Works by Fauré, Hahn, Bonis, L Boulanger
Elena Urioste (violin), Tom Poster (piano)
Chandos CHAN20275 71:17 mins
There are no mere curiosities here. The latest disc from violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster may bring together under-played French works from the 1910s and 1920s, but as their wonderfully vivid performances attest, these are all first-rate pieces deserving a firm place in the repertoire.
Reflecting the disc’s title, taken from Proust, the works on Le Temps retrouvé evoke a sense of nostalgia within a rapidly changing world. The notion of late Romanticism rarely gets applied to French music, but it fits the enthralling combination of lilting nostalgia, fiery passion and playfulness of Mel Bonis’s masterful F sharp minor Sonata. Written just before World War I, the work’s opening movement brings to mind Elgar as much as Franck or Fauré, while the Greek-folksong-inflected slow movement disrupts any sense of cosiness.
Although completed in 1916, ideas for Fauré’s Second Violin Sonata percolated during the genesis of his opera Penelope, unsurprisingly having strong kinship with its musical themes. Typically for the composer’s later style, what looks straightforward on the page turns out to be disconcertingly elusive, the Allegro non troppo opening movement’s rhythms just as radical in their quiet ambiguity as Stravinsky’s more bombastic innovations. Urioste and Poster are not the first to veer close to becoming untethered as multiple threads interweave at the climax, but few match their burnished radiance in the slow movement.
As for Hahn’s Sonata, so affecting is the final movement’s yearning beauty that it would be easy to overlook the touchingly wry bonhomie of the first movement or the middle movement’s hell-for-leather car journey. With the Lili Boulanger as a touching postscript, this is a disc to cherish.