In the 1940
edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
Paul David contributes a column-length entry on Henryk Wieniawski,
almost all of which is devoted to his career as a violinist,
from his days as a child prodigy, through the years of touring,
his time as solo-violinist to the Tsar, in St. Petersburg,
and all the way through to his last tour, undertaken when
in ill-health. This gives rise to a bizarre anecdote: “During
a concert which he gave in Berlin, he was suddenly seized
by a spasm and compelled to stop in the middle of a concerto.
Joachim, who happened to be in the audience, without much
hesitation stepped on to the platform, took up Wieniawski’s
fiddle, and finished the programme amid the enthusiastic
applause of an audience delighted by so spontaneous an act
of good fellowship”. Only at the very end of this account
of Wieniawski the virtuoso does Wieniawski the composer
get any kind of mention. In its entirety, David’s account
of his work as a composer reads as follows: “His compositions
– two concertos, a number of fantasias, pičces de salon,
and some studies – are not of much importance, though much
played”.
“Not of much
importance”, certainly, in the grand musical scheme of things,
and one dreads to think of the consequences of living on
a musical diet entirely made up of such sweetmeats. But
so long as over-indulgence is avoided, there’s no reason
not to enjoy the best of Wieniawski’s “pičces de salon”.
They have of course long been the plaything of virtuosos,
from Heifetz to Ositrakh, Ricci to Perlman. Here two of
Wieniawski’s larger morceaux are played by the excellent
young Polish violinist Patrycja Piekutowska. Though there
is no doubting the security of her technique, she resists
any temptation to indulge in mere flashiness. The G minor
tune in the first section of the Légende is played
with a serious wistfulness and the middle section is persuasively
optimistic. Piekutowska and Wolanin’s performance of the
reprise is genuinely touching, in a sentimental kind of
way. The Polonaise brillante in A major, written
some eighteen years after Wieniawski’s other better known
Polonaise, in D major, was one of the composer’s
last compositions of any substance. This is a longer piece,
which certainly has its moments of ‘brilliance’ – not least
in the famous staccato which, to borrow some words from
Agnieszka Jeż’s booklet notes, “spans 18 notes played
in a single move of the bow (plus trills)”. As Jeż
dryly observes, “it was not without reason that it was dubbed
a ‘devilish’ staccato”. Such technical problems – though
they seem to be no problem to Piekutowska – are set in a
generally very elegant musical frame. Nothing digs very
deep, and it is all perhaps something of a ‘period’ taste
– but Piekutowska and Wolanin certainly put forward the
music’s limited claims very persuasively.
Józef, the younger
brother, seems always to have been the less ‘glamorous’
of the pair. He too was a gifted child; he too won prizes,
in extreme youth, at the Paris Conservatoire. He toured
with his older brother for several years. But less extrovert,
perhaps less ambitious for fame, Józef took little of the
limelight. With the passage of time he seems largely to
have faded from sight. The same edition of Grove
quoted above says this – in total, in an unsigned paragraph
– about him: “brother of the above, was an eminent pianist,
trained at the Paris Conservatoire and with Liszt at Weimar.
He toured much with his brother, held a professorship at
the Moscow Conservatoire ad later at the Brussels Conservatoire.
He was the composer of some chamber music and pianoforte
music”. This time the compositions don’t even merit a judgement
or the most rudimentary of listings. I cannot remember that
I have ever previously heard anything by Józef Wieniawski.
On the evidence of this thoroughly interesting Sonata, we
certainly ought to hear some more of his work. The sonata
has a certain unpompous grandeur of conception, its four
fairly lengthy movements marked allegro moderato – andante
religiosos – scherzo; allegro molto vivace e gioioso – allegro
appassionato ma non troppo presto. There is some decidedly
fine writing here, not least in the strikingly beautiful
andante. The third and fourth movements feature some particularly
inventive interplay between violin and piano and some very
effective, and often quite abrupt, changes of mood. The
piece, heard whole, is of unexpectedly high quality. Never
having heard any other performance, and having no score,
I can only say that Piekutowska and Wolanin give what sounds
like very good performance – if there is even more to the
piece than they find in it, I would be even more surprised!
So, a rewarding
and enjoyable CD, on which the best music comes from the
lesser known of the two brothers.
Glyn Pursglove
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Patrycja Piekutowska
(violin); Edward Wolanin (piano)
