Buywell Just Classical

This incomplete cycle - a six sonata traversal - of Beethoven violin sonatas was recorded two-by-two between March 1975 and May 1976. The musicians are better known for complete cycles with other players – Arrau for his Library of Congress live performances with Szigeti and Grumiaux for his set with Clara Haskil. In the case of the violinist I would far have heard him reprise the cycle with a regular sonata partner such as Castagnone or Hajdu; they may lack the glamour of Arrau’s name but they worked frequently and intensively with Grumiaux and aligned themselves far more completely to his stylistic imperatives.

Pairing him with the gaunt Germanic Arrau might have seemed an ideal heavyweight Philips pairing but it added up to nothing like the sum of its parts. I realise that other commentators down the years have disagreed but for me there are two things missing; a creative absorption in each other’s tonal and expressive drives and, fatally, a want of true ensemble. In the first movement of the Spring one can almost hear Arrau counting out the bars as he pounds away heedless of Grumiaux’s lightly sprung Franco-Belgian ethos. Lissom and elegant as ever Grumiaux remains as true to himself as does, in his heavier, more clogged way Arrau. There is a resultant gulf between them and one that, for once, is not especially revealing or productive. In this sonata they sound most compatible in the finale, by which time it’s too late.

The ensemble in Op.30 No.2 is probably one of the shakiest among the six; though chording is synchronised and the externals of the music making are in place there’s little sense of any real alliance between such moments and the buoyancy that should lift the finale is largely absent. The stylistic opposition between the two does perhaps reach some creative heights at places in Op.12 No.2 where the airy articulation cultivated by the violinist meets a certain grudging avuncularity from Arrau. These moments however perhaps only serve to deepen the sense that this was not a meeting of musical minds.

Jonathan Woolf 

 

 

Return to Review Index