Ravel Violin Works – Lana Neudauer

Somewhere in a Paris archive there’s a version of Ravel who wrote a violin sonata at twenty-two and then apparently forgot about it — or thought better of it, which amounts to the same thing when you’re a composer as ruthless with yourself as he was. That early sonata, the posthumous one from 1897, surfaces here in an interpretation by Lana Neudauer that treats it not as juvenilia to be tolerated but as music worth the same care she gives the mature works. She’s right to. You can hear Fauré’s fingerprints all over it, and a little Franck too, but there’s a wiry tension underneath, already recognizably the young man who would go on to torment his own drafts for decades before releasing anything.

Neudauer plays with a tone that’s leaner than lush. Not thin, exactly. Unsentimental, which turns out to be exactly the right temperament for this composer. Ravel distrusted excess. He wanted precision even in his most sensuous passages, and violinists who slather on vibrato or milk the phrasing tend to betray him. She doesn’t. Her sound has a silvery edge that catches the light without melting into syrup.

Paul Rivinius partners her at the piano with an attentiveness that never draws attention to itself. That’s its own kind of virtue, rarer than you’d think. The 1927 Sonata for violin and piano gets a reading of real character here, especially the second movement marked “Blues,” where Ravel — fresh off his American tour, having heard Gershwin play and absorbed rather more jazz than his French colleagues cared to admit influenced them — asks the violinist to bend pitch, slide, smear. Neudauer doesn’t oversell the idiom. She lets the syncopations sit slightly askew, the portamento just tart enough, and the effect is sly rather than kitschy. The finale’s perpetual motion goes by in a blur of clean articulation; Rivinius keeps the ostinato figures crisp underneath without turning mechanical.

The real discovery of this disc is the Sonata for violin and cello, that severe, almost ascetic four-movement structure Ravel wrote in the aftermath of the First World War, dedicated to the memory of Debussy. I don’t say this lightly, having heard the piece done indifferently more than once. It’s bracing music, spare to the point of austerity, built on open textures and bare octaves that leave nowhere to hide. Neudauer and cellist Julian Steckel don’t try to soften its edges. The slow movement breathes with real desolation; the finale has a scraped, almost Bartókian bite to it. This is Ravel stripped down to sinew, and the performance understands that restraint is the whole argument.

Between these two towers of the program sit the miniatures, worth pausing over rather than filing under “encore repertoire.” The “Habañera” — originally a piece for two pianos, later folded into the Rapsodie espagnole — retains its sultry, hip-swaying pulse even reduced to two players. “Kaddish,” arranged from the second of the Deux mélodies hébraïques, gets an appropriately grave, cantorial delivery from Neudauer, the line unspooling with a patience that never drags. The little “Berceuse sur le nom de Fauré,” composed as a tribute for the elder composer’s seventieth-birthday album, is tossed off here with real tenderness. Barely two minutes, gone before you’ve settled into it, like most good berceuses.

And then Tzigane, the piece everyone actually knows, written for Jelly d’Arányi after she reportedly played Hungarian folk tunes for Ravel until four in the morning at a party. It’s gypsy fiddling refracted through a very French, very knowing sensibility — pastiche as virtuoso showpiece, harmonics glittering, double-stops snapping, that long unaccompanied introduction stretching time before the piano even enters. Neudauer digs in here with more abandon than elsewhere on the disc. Rightly — this is repertoire that punishes discretion. Her intonation in the harmonic passages is dead accurate, which is not nothing; plenty of famous names have fudged those octave harmonics under studio lights.

Does this displace Kremer, or Perlman’s classic account of the sonata with Barenboim, or Augustin Dumay’s aristocratic Tzigane? Not quite. Those readings have a decade or three of legend behind them, and legends aren’t earned overnight. But as a single, intelligently sequenced portrait of Ravel’s entire output for violin — sonatas, showpiece, miniatures, the works — this disc has few rivals for completeness, and the playing throughout is far more than merely serviceable. Neudauer, Rivinius, and Steckel have made a genuine case for hearing this music entire, warts and all, rather than in the usual scattered anthologies. Recommended, and more than politely.