Tianwa Yang Surveys a Sarasate Canon

Violinist Tianwa Yang on the cover of the box set being discussed

This is the time of year when I can catch up on past releases that I have not yet accounted for but still deserve attention. Naxos released its four-CD box set of the complete works composed by Pablo de Sarasate for violin and orchestra in November of 2015, but it was only in the last few days that I had the opportunity to survey this aspect of the composer’s catalog. The soloist for all of the recordings was Tianwa Yang, performing with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra under the baton of Ernest Martínez Izquierdo.

This makes for a generous amount of music, particularly when one realizes that the only work likely to be familiar is the very first track of the first CD! That is the composer’s Opus 20, “Zigeunerweisen” (gypsy airs), best known (at least to my generation) for its frequent appearance on no end of cartoons provided by both Warner and Disney! If all the other selections are unfamiliar, they at least provide generous insight into the composer’s command of an abundance of virtuosic tropes.

I can appreciate that many are likely to view this collection as too much of a good thing. Indeed, just listening to the entirety of a single CD may leave one more than saturated. Fortunately, in the “digital age” it is easier for listeners to sample individual selections, rather than just playing a disc from end to end. If this is the case, then such “occasional visits” are likely to be remembered as journeys of discovery.

This is particularly the case when Sarasate decides to adopt the music other composers. His most ambitious undertaking was his Opus 25, the five-movement Carmen Fantasy, which serves up perspectives on Georges Bizet’s opera that are not encountered in other arrangements of his music. There are also two fantasies on operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Opus 51 (Don Giovanni) and Opus 54 (The Magic Flute), which are just as inventive in their selection of memorable themes.

It is worth noting that Sarasate probably composed most of his works for his own performance. His career covered the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. That landed him in the same time frame as George Bernard Shaw, who saw himself as much a music critic as an author. That combination of talents is revealed in Shaw’s assessment that Sarasate “left criticism gasping miles behind him.”

These days it seems as if the Sarasate repertoire is “miles behind.” Mind you, some readers may recall that Ray Chen played Opus 20 when he made his San Francisco Symphony debut in January of 2011. However, it appears that my last encounter with a departure from that warhorse took place in May of 2023, when violinist Patrick Galvin played Sarasate’s “Romanza andaluza,” accompanied by Connor Buckley at the piano at an Old First Concerts recital. Perhaps I shall get to know that music better when I decided to take on Yang’s other Naxos collection of the complete works for violin and piano!