Marie Cantagrill and Fumiyo Goshima in Brahms

When it comes to recordings of violin and piano music, I am rarely satisfied. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome an excellent recording of Brahms three sonatas for violin and piano where the recorded balance between violin and piano is exemplary. Congratulations to the recording engineers (for a change). The violinist is Marie Cantagrill, and the pianist Fumiyo Goshima. No complaint about the pianist, and my admiration for Ms.Cantagrill is readily apparent. I listened over my Sennheiser wireless headphones and was blissfully happy. As usual, Ms. Cantagrill's violin makes a lovely sound, particularly in the lower registers. Her double stopping is exhibition quality, and I love the way she varies the dynamics, from ff to pp.

Op 78.1st movement (vivace ma non troppo) is taken at a more deliberate tempo than is usually heard. The 2nd movement (adagio) is a true adagio. The 3rd movement (allegro molto moderato) sounds just the right tempo, to me.

Op 100. Is this Ms. Cantagrill's least favourite of the three Brahms violin and piano sonatas? It certainly is my least favourite; the music never really settles down and has no real peaks or troughs. The performance here is excellent, of course, but some enthusiasm is missing in the playing, methinks. But I cannot think of a better recorded performance than here. Probably all my fault that I always find this sonata a little unsatisfying.

Op 108. Nice performance. The usual attributes: superb recorded balance, top-class playing, excellent dynamics, well-chosen tempi. The adagio is a true adagio, the presto agitato a true presto agitato. The adagio provides an excellent spot to sample the wonderful sound and playing of Ms. Cantagrill. In this sonata, as throughout all three, the duo playing is excellent, with both musicians listening to, and responding to, each other.

To sum up: a really satisfying performance of the three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano. The performances reinforce my doubts about always going to highly promoted and lauded international musicians on international labels. Ms.Cantagrill is only really available via YouTube or Spotify, I gather. All praise to those media for giving us access to musicians we would not normally know about.

Marie Cantagrill

Marie Cantagrill is an unusual artist. Born in 1979, she earlier won international prizes and studied in Paris and Brussels. She appears to eschew international travel, prestigious artist agencies, mainstream recording studios, and recording labels. She is based in the Ariège region of France, a mainly rural region in south-west France between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. The various recordings of her playing originate from the same region. "A local girl". But she is also a top-class violinist, with an impeccable technique and very remarkable musicianship. Not everyone wants to be a top international touring soloist; good for her. She plays on a violin made by Bernardus Calcanius, in 1748; hardly a name as well-known as Stradivari, Amati, Vuillaume, or Guarneri. But her violin makes a lovely sound. My guess is that her life is a lot happier and more satisfying than that of most super-stellar touring violinists.

A friend sent me recordings of her playing, made by a local company in south-west France. Recording dates unknown. I started listening with interest, and finished with great enthusiasm. I append to this entry a list of violinists on my shelves playing Bach's six unaccompanied sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Suffice it to say that, for me, no one is better than Marie Cantagrill in this music. There is an internal pattern and logic to much of Bach's music that you can only really appreciate when you play it. No amount of studying the score, or consulting musicologists, will tell you definitely how to phrase it, at what tempo, and how it should sound. Ms Cantagrill appears not to be obsessed with the score in order to try to divine Bach's wishes; nor does she appear to have consulted eminent musicologists in order to learn how the works may have been played in Bach's time. She simply puts her violin under her chin and plays the music as she feels it. Slower movements are sometimes very slow; fast movements are sometimes very fast. The dance movements really dance, and the Chaconne of the second partita, taken at a welcome deliberate speed, reveals Ms Cantagrill's incredible double-stopping. Throughout, we wonder at her incredible playing in pianissimo passages. Holding listeners' interest with a solo violin requires a wide repertoire of dynamics, and different bowings. We get all of that with Ms Cantagrill.

There are very, very few minor fluffs in the playing; much as you would get in a live performance of challenging music lasting nearly two hours. My guess is that the local recording studio did not do twelve takes of the same track, as many studios would have done. No wonder Ms. Cantagrill's playing sounds so spontaneous and almost improvised at times. The files came to me from a friend; the recordings are out there somewhere on the web, but may be difficult to find easily. No matter: finding them is a real joy (and an eye-opener as to the playing of "non-celebrities"). As a dessert, I have just received from the same source Ms Cantagrill's recordings of the three sonatas for violin and piano by Brahms. More on that in a future blog entry.

Comparison - the Six Works

Barati, Kristof. 2009

Cantagrill, Marie. [2020]

Enescu, George, 1948

Faust, Isabelle. 2011

Feng, Ning. 2016

Fulkerson, Gregory. 2007

Grumiaux, Arthur, 1960

Hadelich, Augustin. 2020

Heifetz, Jascha, 1952

Ibragimova, Alina. 2008

Kavakos, Leonidas 2020

Milstein, Nathan, 1973

Schayegh, Leila 2020

Shumsky, Oscar. 1978

St. John, Lara, 2007

Suwanai, Akiko. 2021

Suk, Josef. 1970

Tetzlaff, Christian. 1993

Weithaas, Antje. 2012-17

Fernando Palatin

"Auch kleine Dinge können uns entzücken.

Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein."

Italienisches Liederbuch (Hugo Wolf)

For my coming birthday, a kind friend sent me a CD of violin and piano pieces by Fernando Palatin. Palatin -- of whom I had never heard in my entire life -- was born in Seville in 1852, and died in 1927. He was a touring virtuoso whose music is of the same genre as that of his compatriot, Pablo de Sarasate, and of Fritz Kreisler. Of the 14 pieces for violin & piano, most are not overtly "Spanish", nor overtly virtuosic, and will appeal to lovers of the short violin pieces by Kreisler and Sarasate, though the style is further west than Kreisler's Austro-German accent. The CD was recorded in 2020 by Rafael Munoz-Torrero (violin) and Julio Moguer (piano). The violinist, like Palatin, is from Seville. I had never heard of Munoz-Torrero either, but he plays elegantly and has an enchanting manner with the music. Franco-Spanish in playing style, rather than German or Russian.

Since everyone concerned (apart from Georges Bizet) is from Seville, we get a Carmen Fantasia. Palatin's is at least as good as Sarasate's, and infinitely better than that of showy Franz Waxman in Hollywood. Those with the facility, may want to use "shuffle play" to avoid always playing the fourteen pieces in the same order. I love especially the first piece: Adios al Alcázar. The piano parts are intelligent and interesting, and the recording well-balanced. This is a CD to listen to, sit back, and enjoy. Why have we never met composer nor violinist before?

Shostakovich's 8th Symphony

Dimitri Dimitriyevich Shostakovich was born in 1906, and died in 1975. After his death, I say goodbye to music composed after him, crowning around 300 years of music that outlives all fashions. I can think of nothing composed after Shostakovich that appears again and again on concert or recital programmes, though there is an abundance of "new music" that appears once or twice, then vanishes. I have just been listening to Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, a work with many very noisy episodes and full of the composer's constant paranoia. It is important to get the volume right when listening to a recording; the works ends pianissimo. If the volume is set too low, you won't hear it. If the volume is set higher, the very loud passages will blow you out of your chair.

Shostakovich always speaks to me, unlike Harrison Birtwistle and a host of others.

I listened to the work this morning in a Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall recording, with the BPO conducted by Kirill Petrenko. Wonderfully played, and with a demonstration-class recording (the 8th symphony needs both). I don't know much about Kirill Petrenko who, unlike many others of his ilk, appears to keep a low profile and just gets on conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, with occasional guest appearances elsewhere. But he and the orchestra take to Shostakovich like ducks to water; fortunately, since I have the 9th and 10th symphonies from the same source lined up on the listening ramp, completing my cannon of the three Shostakovich symphonies I most enjoy.