I must admit to being
a little puzzled by this release. The
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op.108
is in fact not a work by the well known
second-best violinist of the 19th
century after Paganini, but is a faithful
transcription of the even better known
W.A. Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and
Strings. This being the case, surely
it would have been better to announce
the work as such, rather than tempting
the casual purchaser of new romantic
repertoire into looking forward to an
evening of romantic chamber music. This
transcription is not even usually listed
as part of Vieuxtemps’ ‘complete works’
for viola and piano, with the Sonata
in B flat, Elegy and Capriccio
in C minor usually sufficing.
This transcription
was uncovered in Hamburg in 1979, and
is indeed a useful addition to the viola
repertoire. Vieuxtemps treats Mozart’s
beautiful work with great sensitivity,
keeping the harmonies of the string
quartet intact and unadorned with romantic
extras. The musicians in this case also
play with a pleasant unpretentiousness
and admirable lightness of touch, though
the slightly scratchy sound of the viola
takes a little getting used to. The
usually effortless clarinet figurations
in the opening movement come across
as a little scrabbly, lying less naturally
on the viola fingerboard. The beautiful
Larghetto is sublime in just
about any setting however. The recording
is rather dry, set in what sounds like
a fairly small studio, so any imperfections
of tone or intonation are horribly exposed.
These are thankfully few and far between
however, and I doff my hat to the skill
of these musicians in this most demanding
of composers.
Vieuxtemps’ own Unfinished
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op. Postume
No.14 is very much in the idiom
of its time, with grand themes, developments,
sequences and tricks of contrast and
modulation holding few real surprises.
The ‘Unfinished’ appellation is now
considered to be a misnomer, having
been published in 1884 under the title
"Allegro and Scherzo for concertante
piano and alto", which leads to
the assumption that the work only ever
had two movements. The first movement
is an inventive Allegro, but
the rather laboured Scherzo can’t
really be rated among Vieuxtemps’ best
work. Unfortunately there is
a small production problem: the two
movements are marked as being on two
tracks, but someone has forgotten to
put access point 6 onto the master.
This release gives
Vieuxtemps the more anglophile ‘Henry’
where I would have expected the usual
spelling ‘Henri’, but this is a small
point. Another small point is the rather
clunky English booklet note, which is
rather disorientates the reader by being
set in the present tense: "Henry
Vieuxtemps is one of the most brilliant
violinists of the 19th century."
There is also one particularly life-enhancing
typo, as pianist Angéline Pondepeyre
has apparently worked under the direction
of the famous conductor James Colon.
Enough pickiness: this
disc provides us with two relatively
unknown pieces, one an interesting and
effective version of one of Mozart’s
greatest chamber pieces, and the other
a neglected but charming representative
of late romanticism in the 19th
century. The recording is not an unalloyed
pleasure – the rather grainy and choppy
sound of Pierre-Henri Xuereb’s viola
and some difficulties with an easy sounding
legato here and there making some aspects
of this release more of an academic
duty than a blissful addition to one’s
chamber music shelves. There are a few
desperate papery noises from the poor
page turner in the Op. Posthume work
as well. If 19th century
transcriptions and the less well-trodden
paths of this era’s music is your thing,
this is another disc which may or may
not reward exploration: your call.
Dominy Clements
Pierre-Henri Xuereb (viola) 
