Sonata for Violin and Piano (1914-15, rev. 1921) [17:52]
Karol SZYMANOWSKI (1882-1937)
Mythes (1915) [19:36]
Witold LUTOSŁAWSKI (1913-1994)
Subito (1992) [4:55]
Partita (1984) [16:23]
Isabelle Faust (violin); Ewa Kupiec (piano)
rec. Teldex Studio, Berlin, Germany, August 2002
HARMONIA MUNDI HMA 1951793 [59:21]
Szymanowski remains one of the great injustices of the concert hall. His music sits in a corner of the repertoire that performers visit occasionally, admirers praise effusively, and audiences receive with puzzled goodwill — then promptly forget. So a disc that pairs his Mythes with the Janáček Sonata in performances of this quality deserves more than a passing nod.Start with Faust. Isabelle Faust has always been a violinist who thinks before she plays — you can hear it in the care she brings to intonation, to the specific weight she places on a phrase, to the way she resists the obvious emotional move and finds something more interesting underneath. She is not a glamour player in the Perlman sense; her tone is lean, focused, sometimes almost austere. With Ewa Kupiec beside her, she makes a formidable partner. Kupiec is no mere accompanist here — she brings her own musical personality to bear without ever crowding the violinist’s space.
The Janáček is a peculiar piece. Written in 1914, revised repeatedly over the next decade, it wears its Moravian roots lightly — this is not folk music dressed up in art-music clothes, but something rawer and stranger, full of violent contrasts and sudden lyrical surrender. Faust and Kupiec understand that. The first movement has real urgency, the kind of forward motion that makes you feel the music is always about to escape its own formal boundaries. The second movement, the Ballada, finds genuine tenderness — not sentiment, not sweetness, but the harder, more vulnerable emotion that Janáček almost always means. And the final Adagio breathes properly; too many violinists rush its introspective passages as though embarrassed by them.
I have long kept the Suk/Firkušný Supraphon disc on a kind of honorary pedestal — those two men knew this music from the inside out, knew Janáček’s Brno the way you know a city you grew up in. But live recordings have their liabilities, and that one has serious ones: the piano frequently disappears into the acoustic murk, and the first movement — they either take no repeat or make cuts, producing a timing that barely reaches half what Faust and Kupiec give it. The sonata is short enough as it is. Poetry matters here, and Suk and Firkušný, for all their authority, occasionally sacrifice it to momentum. Faust and Kupiec belong at the top of this work’s discography. One small reservation: the piano theme opening the third movement Allegretto wants more staccato crispness than Kupiec gives it — other recordings make you hear the irony in those detached little figures, and that irony is part of the point.
Then the Szymanowski. Here all reservations dissolve.
The Mythes were written in 1915, the same fertile period that produced Masques and Métopes for solo piano — but where those works can feel labyrinthine, almost self-consuming in their harmonic density, the violin pieces wear their Ravel and Scriabin debts more gracefully. The string writing has the luminous, overtone-rich quality of the concertos, and the first of the three pieces, “La fontaine d’Aréthuse,” is as purely radiant as anything Szymanowski wrote. Faust opens it with a rhythmic suppleness that never loses its impressionistic shimmer — clarity without hardness, which is exactly the trick the piece requires. “Narcisse” is more languid, more dangerous in its erotic ambiguity, and Faust navigates its long-breathed phrases with the kind of focus that keeps the music from going slack. The duo’s ensemble here is simply stunning.
This is a Harmonia Mundi reissue of a 2003 recording, brought back at budget price. At whatever price, it would be worth having.
