Bartók: Sonata for Solo Violin – Poulet

Gérard Poulet’s father studied with Ysaÿe, and something of that lineage — the old Franco-Belgian school, with its silvery tone and its refusal to let virtuosity trump song — clings to his playing even here, in music about as far from Ysaÿe’s sound world as one could travel without leaving the violin altogether.

Bartók wrote the Sonata for Solo Violin in the last full year of his life, dying in New York not long after, poor and largely unrecognized by the American musical establishment that should have known better. Menuhin had asked for the piece, and got something almost punishingly severe in return — a work that looks back past Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas to something older and stranger, folk fiddling filtered through a mind that had spent decades transcribing peasant melodies in the Carpathians with a wax cylinder recorder and an ethnomusicologist’s obsessive rigor. The fugue that opens the second movement is murderous to bring off with any clarity; too many violinists turn it into scrubbing. Poulet doesn’t. You can hear the separate voices, each strand given its own color, its own weight of bow.

The “Melodia” is where he really persuades me. There’s a tone here, not large, but concentrated, that recalls (forgive the antique comparison) something of Joseph Szigeti’s spare eloquence in this same score, minus Szigeti’s occasional rawness of intonation. Poulet sustains the long line without letting the movement go slack, and the closing bars have an ache to them that never curdles into sentimentality. Bartók marks so much of this music molto espressivo, and it would be easy to overplay the pathos given the circumstances of composition. Poulet doesn’t.

The finale is another matter. Genuinely difficult to love, full of quarter-tones and manic scrubbing rhythms that Bartók apparently softened somewhat after Menuhin complained of the work’s near-unplayability. Poulet attacks it with a kind of gritty relish. Not pretty. Not meant to be.

Then, unaccountably — or maybe not so unaccountably, since both works share that Bartók-Kodály axis of Hungarian modernism reaching backward into folk sources — we get the Kodály Duo, op. 7, composed in 1914, on the eve of a war that would scatter half of Europe’s musical culture. Christoph Henkel joins Poulet here, playing, so the notes tell us, a cello once owned by Barbirolli. Their first movement has genuine chemistry: Poulet floating a phrase around the six-minute mark with real sweetness, Henkel answering in that dark, burnished register cellists dream of finding and rarely do. The slow movement is the heart of the interpretation. Kodály opens huge gaps between the instruments, stretches of near-silence charged with unease, and these two players resist the temptation to fill the space with expressive glue. They let it breathe. Let it unsettle.

Forty-seven minutes total, which by any commercial logic is ungenerous — Harmonia Mundi or Hyperion would have found something to pad this out with, a Kodály solo cello sonata perhaps. But playing time isn’t music. This particular hour, less than an hour actually, has more concentrated thought in it than most two-disc sets of salon Romanticism. The 1987 engineering holds up: close but not claustrophobic, with a decent sense of the room around the instruments.

Competing versions of the Bartók abound — Kremer, Ehnes, Kopatchinskaja in more recent, more extroverted readings — but Poulet’s has an unfashionable modesty that wears well on repeated hearings. Not the most electric account on disc. Among the most truthful.