Ferdinand David: Violin Works Rediscovered

What survives of Ferdinand David in the musical memory is mostly shadow — the friend, the colleague, the dedicatee. Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto for David; Schumann entrusted him with the D minor Sonata. For 37 years David stood at the Gewandhaus concertmaster’s desk, which means he presided over one of the great sustained epochs in the history of orchestral music-making, and helped co-found the Leipzig Conservatory besides. A man of that stature, that centrality, should have left more than a footnote.

He left music, too. That’s what this disc is here to remind us.

The timing matters. Around 1849 and 1850 — with Mendelssohn two years dead and the world of the Leipzig salon perhaps feeling the absence of its most brilliant ornament — David turned away from the concertante pieces he had been writing essentially for himself to play at his own concerts and moved toward chamber music. The shift feels like more than a change in genre. It feels like grief finding a different form.

The Salon-Duet came early in that transition, and it announces something genuinely appealing: a lyric gift working confidently within tight constraints. David takes a Burns song — one of those Scots melodies that traveled so well across the Channel in German translation — and subjects it to a set of variations that begin with something close to simple charm and end somewhere considerably more commanding. The classical architecture holds, but the romantic impulse keeps pressing against it, like a vine through old brickwork.

The Suite, Op. 43 for solo violin is the disc’s most intriguing offering, and also its most historically peculiar. The obvious reference point is Bach — Mendelssohn had done as much as anyone to put Bach back into Leipzig’s concert life — but David wasn’t writing homage or pastiche. He was doing something stranger and harder to name. Five movements, each carrying the title of a Baroque dance, but the relationship to those forms is oblique rather than imitative. The central “Gavotte” comes closest to what you might call a genuine structural conversation with the Baroque past; the other movements keep their distance. What strikes you is how unusual this must have seemed in the early 1850s, when the solo violin sonata as a genre was barely on anyone’s radar. The heyday of that repertoire — Ysaÿe, Bartók, Prokofiev — lay decades off. David was working in a near-vacuum, and the result is something that neither sounds entirely comfortable in its own skin nor pretends to.

Then there are the Twelve Salon Pieces, Op. 24, which are by turns enchanting and revealing in ways David probably didn’t fully intend. The assimilation of his models isn’t always complete. The Beethovenian scherzo leans so close to the corresponding movement of the Spring Sonata that you almost want to look away — David knew that work intimately, of course, and the echo feels less like homage than like a page left too long open. The “Romanze” could slip unnoticed into a collection of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. The “Rondo” has a Schumannesque elegance that sits more easily on the ear precisely because Schumann’s textures were always a little more porous, more willing to let other voices in.

But there’s a “Ballade” here that sounds like nobody but David — refined, slightly oblique, with a rhythmic profile that keeps you from settling too comfortably. And “Ständchen” is flat-out funny, a serenade that keeps undercutting its own ardor with a dry wit that reminds you this was a man who spent decades in close proximity to Mendelssohn, who had wit to burn.

The disc closes with three undated Impromptus in waltz form — ingeniously constructed, attentive to the balance between the instruments in ways that suggest David knew exactly where the traps were and took quiet pleasure in avoiding them.

What we’re left with is a portrait of a player who was thoroughly civilized, occasionally more than that, and who deserves at least this much rescue from the footnote to which history has consigned him. Not a masterpiece in the bunch — but music that thinks, breathes, and occasionally surprises. That’s not nothing. In fact, right now, it feels like quite a lot.