Sarah Chang
      French Violin Music

*  Franck: Violin Sonata in A
*  Saint-Saens: Violin Sonata No. 1 in d
*  Ravel: Violin Sonata (1923-27)

Sarah Chang, violin; Lars Vogt, piano.
EMI 7243 5 57679 2 9  Total time: 68:46

Summary for the Busy Executive: Haut cuisine.

I believe I may have mentioned that the French musical nineteenth century
is an almost total loss for me, with the major exception of Berlioz and
a couple of other pieces here and there.  For me, very little interesting
happens until we get to Massenet, Faure, Chabrier, and Debussy.  It's a
long time to wait.  The disc represents to me the struggle of French
composers to break free from German influence to something individual
and worthwhile, as well as the final triumph.

Saint-Saens's music stands for, largely, accommodation -- the musical
Vichy.  Indeed, he was just as successful in Germany as in France, which
means he enjoyed a huge European success.  Saint-Saens writes suavely,
elegantly, even at times brilliantly, but the feelings don't run all
that deep.  His first violin sonata is beautifully made, on a phrase-by-phrase
basis, although it doesn't really hang together at a thematic level.  He
tends to smooth over the joins so that you tend not to notice that the
first and second subjects of the first movement, for example, lovely as
they are, seem to belong to different pieces.  Saint-Saens has immense
craft as well as consideration that his listener not hit a speed bump,
so to speak.  But he applies the craft as if on "automatic." You appreciate
the craft but miss the brilliant or poetic imaginative stroke.  Just
compare this violin sonata to any by Brahms or Beethoven, and you feel
the lack even more.

Franck's only violin sonata comes as a considerable step up.  At any
rate, it appeals to me far more than most Franck -- including the symphony
-- really toward the front of the line, as far as Franck's output goes.
Most people ooh and ah over the last movement because it's a "canon."
Actually, it always comes over to me at the same level as Sam & Dave
call and response.  Nevertheless, I like the tune very much, one of the
composer's best, with its unexpected Faure-like harmonies, and it rounds
off the sonata very well.  However, I reserve my real enthusiasm for the
other movements, especially the first, with its apparent presage of
Debussy in the first theme.  Compared to much of Franck, the work proceeds
much more subtly, with less obvious joinery.  Franck for once uses his
cyclic form in an almost "botanical" way -- the delicate growth of a
flower, rather than the clunks and bumps of something like the symphony.
He varies his cells just enough, shape as well as rhetorical emphasis,
so that they don't seem stuck on, like post-it notes on a refrigerator
door.  Thus, the main idea of the first movement becomes a subsidiary
phrase in the second-movement scherzo, while a subsidiary idea of the
first movement receives more emphasis in the scherzo's Sturm und Drang.
The slow movement is the most interesting.  There's such a sense of
struggle with form -- missing from the Saint-Saens (or any Saint-Saens)
-- which adds to its fascination.  It's so sectional that you wonder
whether the thing will fall apart.  It never does.  It may run rough and
brisk, but it definitely takes you along.  It strikes me as a very French
Romantic homage to a Bach fantasia -- the slow, stately opening, the
recitative for the violin, and the builds from sparse to full at the
beginning of each new bit.

I can't think of too many violin sonatas I prefer to the Ravel, including
the ones by Brahms.  It always surprises me to be reminded that Ravel
wrote it almost as an act of defiance.  He thought the sonorities of the
violin and the piano totally mismatched.  Rather than smooth over the
differences, he emphasizes them, and he's such a brilliant contrapuntalist
(something most people don't associate with him) that he brings it off.
The sonata comes from his last period, the Twenties.  It took him four
years, and among other things, he destroyed the original finale and
created a whole new one.  The exotic always drew Ravel -- gypsy music
in Tzigane, the "Spanish" music like the Alborada del gracioso and Bolero,
the Viennese waltz, Russian music in A la maniere de Borodine, and of
course the "Madagascar" songs.  After the First World War, like so many
Europeans, he fell in love with jazz.  Unlike a lot of them, however,
he didn't often isolate it as such -- the foxtrot from L'Enfant et les
sortileges comes to mind -- but usually incorporated it into his general
musical vocabulary.  The violin sonata shows both tendencies.  In the
second movement, titled "Blues," Ravel evokes jazz through blue notes
and riffs, rather than actually writing a real blues.  Furthermore, there
are a considerable number of measures that have nothing to do with blues
in that work, measures that Ravel indeed could have written at any time
in his career.  The brilliant counterpoint appears right at the beginning,
with a supple, insinuating theme that has both players often phrasing
against, rather than with each other.  The sonata's design is a bit
unusual, since there's no true slow movement.  The "blues" middle movement
functions as a mostly-quiet scherzo, while the finale is a whirlwind,
very strongly related to the finale of the G-major piano concerto.  People
usually talk of Ravel as surface, possibly because the surface is so
fantastic, in both senses.  But the music sings of psychological complexity.
It almost always gets inside you, like a basic fairy tale.  This work,
the slow movement to the piano concerto, the Trois Chansons, the
Introduction et Allegro, L'Enfant, the last song of Don Quichotte a
Dulcinee, among so many others, are masterpieces that not only sparkle,
but speak wisely.

Sarah Chang was a good violinist at an early age.  But I always felt
that it was the precocity rather than the actual achievement that got
her the attention.  Well, she's older now and has gotten much, much
better -- indeed, one of the best around.  All of this music demands
a performer with an aristocratic musical mind.  Chang and Vogt deliver
hands down the best Franck sonata I've heard.  In fact, they managed to
raise my genuine admiration for the piece.  The Saint-Saens they play
as well as anybody, including Heifetz and Bay.  I sense tremendous
preparation and care behind all these performances.  It's not that they
play as if one mind, but they sound as if they're always listening to
one another and are prepared to respond nothing less than perfectly.
In most chamber partnerships, the image is that of conversation.  Here,
it's practically slow-dance.  If I have nit-picks, it's that I'm not
sure of the "weight" of Chang's sound for the Big Stuff, like the
"Kreutzer" sonata or the Tchaikovsky concerto, or whether she would ever
let herself go or risk something over-the-top.  It could simply be the
program she's chosen, although Oistrakh, for example, plays the Ravel
with more fire.  Make no mistake, however: this is one gorgeous CD.

Steve Schwartz