Isabelle Faust

Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Weber: Sonatas for Piano & Violin, Piano Quartet (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:09 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The unjustly neglected piano quartet (J76) was completed in September of the year 1809, which the 22-year-old Weber spent in Stuttgart. It was originally offered to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, but he rejected it, advising the composer that it created wanton ‘confusion in the arrangement of its ideas’ and indeed too obviously imitated the ‘bizarreries’ of Beethoven. However, the work was issued a year later by the Bonn firm of Beethoven’s friend and admirer Nikolaus Simrock, whose ears were more receptive to the peculiarities of the score than Nägeli. And in the following year, 1811, Simrock once again stepped into the breach in the matter of the publication of the Six Violin Sonatas (J99–104). These were written to a tight deadline in the late summer of 1810, on commission from the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton André, who had in mind a collection of short pieces of moderate difficulty for the domestic music-making of the upper middle classes. Unhappy with the concomitant artistic limitations, Weber took the commission only half-heartedly and repeatedly complained during the compositional process of this ‘swine of a job’, which cost him ‘more sweat than the same number of symphonies’. His annoyance was all the greater when André rejected the finished work out of hand because it did not correspond to his expectations.

When Simrock finally published these pieces in Bonn in two instalments under the title ‘Progressive sonatas for fortepiano with obbligato violin, composed for and dedicated to amateur musicians’, with the opus number 10, Weber had only remotely followed André’s specifications. It is true that the technical demands on the performers, especially the violin, are fairly modest, but in terms of content the 6 short two- or three-movement sonatinas far outstrip mere pedagogical intentions.They were written to please amateurs, but quite as much to satisfy connoisseurs of any era.

Isabelle Faust follows up the success of recent recordings for hm [Bach volume 2, Berg and Beethoven with Claudio Abbado] with regular partner Alexander Melnikov and her brother Boris, currently principal viola of the Bremer Philharmoniker, and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt of whom Mstislav Rostropovich has said: ‘Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt is one of the leading cellists of his generation, of our time’.

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Isabelle Faust & Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 3 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:03 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

By modifying the balance of the dialogue between the two protagonists, whom he turns into genuine alter egos, Mozart leads the genre of the sonata for fortepiano and violin onto the road to modernity. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present here the third volume of an exciting complete set on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour”, is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).

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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Brahms, Schumann & Dietrich: Violin Sonatas (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:49 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

A 19th-century ‘trio sonata’. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov have already given us an acclaimed version Brahms’s First Violin Sonata, in 2007. They now complete the cycle with the other two sonatas of 1886 and 1888, and add a fascinating rarity dating from 35 years earlier: the ‘F-A-E’ Sonata, a collaborative effort by three composers in honour of the great violinist Joachim, who had to guess who had written which movement! He did so with ease, for the Scherzo is as eminently Brahmsian as the Intermezzo and Finale are Schumannesque. Alexander Melnikov will be contributing his take on a score his mother gave him that belonged to Sviatoslav Richter in September BBC Music Magazine.

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