Grieg Violin Sonatas – Menuhin

Menuhin at thirty-one was not yet the figure of controversy he would become — the wobble, the intonation troubles, the well-meaning but sometimes misguided later career. In October 1957, at Abbey Road’s Studio 3, he was still fully himself: the tone warm and rounded, the phrasing shaped with that particular gift for singing a long melodic line without ever losing its forward momentum. That these Grieg sonatas have languished in relative obscurity for decades is, frankly, inexplicable. They deserve far better.

Grieg himself thought so. He considered the three violin sonatas among his finest achievements — a judgment posterity has been slow to ratify, perhaps because the Piano Concerto casts such a long shadow over everything else he wrote. But the sonatas are serious, substantial pieces, not parlor entertainment. The first two, composed in the mid-1860s when Grieg was barely into his twenties, show the marks of Ole Bull’s influence — that charismatic Norwegian fiddler-nationalist who essentially steered young Edvard toward a musical career in the first place. Bull’s idiom, rooted in the folk traditions of the Hardanger fiddle with its sympathetic strings and flat bridge and wildly ornamented melodic flights, left a permanent fingerprint on Grieg’s melodic imagination.

The first sonata, in f major — the key of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, and not accidentally so — has something of that work’s radiant, unguarded optimism. But Grieg’s slow movement already betrays the Hardanger influence: a kind of ornamentation that doesn’t quite belong to the Viennese tradition, something rawer and more earthbound. Menuhin hears all of this. His second movement here is genuinely folk-inflected without becoming folksy — a distinction most violinists either miss entirely or overplay.

The second sonata, written while Grieg was on his honeymoon in 1867, is even more saturated with the national spirit. The finale’s dance rhythms have an almost physical energy to them. Menuhin and Robert Levin — a pianist who would go on to become one of the most searching Mozart scholars of his generation, though in 1957 he was just beginning — achieve something rare here: a real chamber-music conversation rather than a violin recital with piano accompaniment.

Then there is the third sonata.

Grieg wrote nothing quite like it again. By 1886 he was in his early forties, the Piano Concerto long behind him, and whatever youthful ebullience had animated the earlier sonatas had been replaced by something darker and more complex. The first movement in c minor is genuinely turbulent — almost Brahmsian in its weight, though Grieg arrives at that weight by different roads. The comparison to Brahms’s D minor violin sonata is apt but only up to a point; Grieg’s harmonic language remains distinctively his own, the modal inflections and unexpected tonal shifts that are his personal signature appearing even here, in this most serious of his chamber works.

Menuhin understood this music from the inside. The tone in the third sonata’s first movement has an urgency that doesn’t sacrifice beauty — the two qualities coexist in a way that only the finest players manage. There are moments where the violin seems to almost speak rather than sing.

Pristine Audio’s XR remastering by Andrew Rose works its usual disciplined magic on what was, for 1957, an early stereo source. Menuhin’s violin comes through rich and full, with only occasional hardness on the highest notes — a trace of period-recording wiriness that bothers less than you’d expect. The piano reproduction is surprisingly substantial, though isolated upper-register notes can turn slightly glassy. These are minor complaints. The sonic picture is vivid enough to let the music through.

For competing versions: Henning Kruse and Einar Steen-Nøkleberg made a strong case for the sonatas in a Norwegian recording that captures something of the indigenous folk spirit; and Augustin Dumay with Maria João Pires produced a beautifully polished DG account that emphasizes the works’ European credentials over their national ones. Both have their advocates. But there is something in this Menuhin disc — a directness, a naturalness, an absence of interpretive self-consciousness — that puts it in a class of its own. Not everything Menuhin touched turned to gold. This did.