Complete Music for Violin, Viola and Piano
Eduard Tubin (1905-82)
BIS-CD-541/542
Tubin’s Chamber Music: A Complete and Compelling Portrait
One must begin by acknowledging Robert von Bahr’s peculiar genius—or stubbornness, depending on your view. BIS has maintained an almost quixotic loyalty to certain composers, keeping recordings available year after year while other labels churn through their catalogues like fashion houses discarding last season’s hemlines. I still have the LP of those Sallinen symphonies from the 1970s; the CD version remains in print. This is either admirable or commercially mad, possibly both.
With Eduard Tubin, BIS has been particularly steadfast. The complete symphonies, concertos, piano music, and now this: 148 minutes of chamber works spread across two discs in one of those old-fashioned double jewel cases—bulky, yes, but necessitated by Vardo Rumessen’s sixty-page booklet, which is itself worth the price of admission.
The chronological layout is sensible enough. Roughly 120 minutes for violin and piano, twenty-four minutes for solo violin, just over half an hour for viola with piano. What emerges is a portrait of a composer for whom the violin wasn’t merely a favored instrument but something closer to an obsession. Tubin wrote several violin concertos, planted considerable solo episodes in six of his symphonies, and collaborated intimately with the violinist Evald Turgan—until the Soviets deported Turgan to Siberia in 1944, one of those biographical facts that stops you cold.
The early pieces on the first disc reveal Tubin’s dual fascination: Estonian folk idiom and the demonic possibilities of the violin. The allegro marciale from the Three Pieces has that truculent country-fiddler energy—not sanitized for concert halls but rough-edged, authentic. The “Cock’s Dance” from the ballet Kratt strikes similar sparks. There’s a Mephistophelian streak here that the booklet designers understood perfectly: the cover reproduces Eduard Wiiralt’s “The Violinist,” a ghoulish image that could illustrate Gogol.
Tubin met Kodály during a 1938 visit to Hungary, having already absorbed the folk research of Bartók and Kodály from his reading. The influence shows, though Tubin’s music lacks that explosive euphoria you find in the Galanta Dances. Listen instead to “The Kantele Player” from the Suite of Estonian Dances—those piano whorls at the opening, then a crossing of Kodály-like ecstasy with the jollity of Petrushka. The “Old Waltz” from the same suite has that rural skirl, earthier than concert Kodály, closer perhaps to the authentic soil of Jānis Ivanovs’s delightful violin concerto.
But there’s another Tubin here, one given to rapturous meditation. The Ballade floats into regions occupied by Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending or Julius Harrison’s Bredon Hill—that same ecstatic flight. The Prelude opens with spidery piano ostinato, rippling as joyously as the piano part in Bax’s Winter Legends, before melting into similar transcendence.
The Suite of Estonian Dance Tunes for solo violin closes the first disc with five movements that intensify the “country” feeling—you can almost see the peripatetic performer traveling from fair to wedding to market. Accessible, direct music. Then comes the Sonata for Solo Violin, and suddenly we’re in different territory entirely. This is severe music, only eleven minutes but tough going, especially after so much that welcomes you in. Think of Frankel’s two solo violin sonatas—that level of uncompromising concentration.—The second disc presents the four sonatas, and here Tubin’s full ambition declares itself. None overstays its welcome; all achieve that elusive balance between succinctness and epic scope.
The First Sonata (in its 1969 revision) runs just under seventeen minutes of fluent passion. There are slightly jazzy moments, yes, but the work’s true soul lies in its rhapsodic engagement with concerto format—textures tangibly orchestral at points. Prokofiev’s potent lyricism meets Shostakovich’s worldly sardonics. The three movements flow without pause, which is exactly right.
The Second Sonata extends five minutes longer and introduces a strong macabre accent. Field Marshal Death stalks the first movement; the finale is truculent, searching, caustically brilliant, raggedly playful—all those adjectives somehow coexisting. The second movement builds from a humble unison theme into an elegiac meditation, sweet and high, with a moment at 5:17 of real tenderness. The Northern Lights theme that also appears in the Second Piano Sonata and Sixth Symphony surfaces here as an implacably cold, plutonic presence.
After Jaak Leibur’s meatily sweet violin for ninety-odd minutes, we’re regaled with Petra Vahle’s hoarse and incisive viola. The final two sonatas occupy territory of high seriousness—no humor unless it’s the levity of the gallows. There’s tenderness but also aggression, a conviction of dark agencies at work. The colors are subdued, sinister. I thought more than once of early Copland’s Vitebsk, though Tubin is hardly as Hebraic. A later reference point might be the negation of Shostakovich’s viola sonata.
The Saxophone Sonata (heard here in the viola version) and the Viola Sonata proper make formidable demands on both performers. Vahle meets them with an edge to her tone that suits this music perfectly—no attempt to beautify what Tubin left deliberately rough.—Rumessen’s contribution extends far beyond his pianism, though that’s consistently outstanding. His booklet notes are models of what such writing should be: factual specifics about dates and people, vivid description, forty-two music examples. He writes with flair and deals in useful detail rather than vague generalizations. I’ve pirated shamelessly from his commentary here, and I apologize.
Rumessen is to Estonian music what Lewis Foreman and Vernon Handley have jointly been
