Renaud Capuçon, Khatia Buniatishvili, and César Franck

The sonata for violin and piano in A major by César Franck was written in 1886 as a wedding present for Eugène Ysaÿe. My groaning shelves currently contain no less than 55 different recordings of the work, the oldest (and perhaps greatest) being by Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot in 1923 (the pair re-recorded the work post-electric recording in 1929). Every violinist plays the work; even I, in my youth, played both the violin and the viola versions. Technically the violin part is not too virtuosic, though the piano part is often tricky.

It is important to remember the work's Franco-Belgian origins, since all too often this music of the high-Romantic era is beefed up by violinists and pianists so that it sounds almost Russian, Italian or German. Ysaÿe was a sophisticated violinist, and I immediately took to the suave, sophisticated sound of Renaud Capuçon on a brand new Erato CD. This, surely, is how Franck's violin part is meant to sound. I cannot fault Capuçon's sound or playing in this work, where he seems to be following in the august footsteps of the great Belgian Arthur Grumiaux, another suave and sophisticated player.

A big attraction of this CD for me, however, was to re-hear Khatia Buniatishvili in the piano part. The Franck sonata is very much a duo sonata (even if the violin part is somewhat the more important) and it benefits from a pianist of at least similar stature to the violinist (thus the historic success of Cortot and Thibaud, and Ferras and Barbizet). Buniatishvili did not disappoint; she has an extraordinary touch on the piano keyboard and I have mentally nicknamed her “velvet paws” for the sleek, purring sound she often obtains from her piano – not that she is reticent or limp-wristed, quite the contrary – but her sound is so distinctive (and she is also an excellent musician and partner, here). All in all, this makes for a truly memorable and enjoyable account of César Franck's somewhat over-played sonata. I'll come back to it with pleasure. And, a plus, Erato has balanced the violin and piano parts as they should be balanced (for these works).