Elgar / Debussy / Respighi: Violin Sonatas

After the rapturous critical reception for their Franck & Strauss Violin Sonatas (ONYX4141), 'Theirs is masterly playing ....(Franck sonata) Yet it is in the companion piece (Strauss) in which Ehnes comes out with all interpretative guns blazing...Ehnes and Armstrong make the slow movement the work's emotional heart, capturing its Mendelssohnian wistfulness to perfection' BBC Music Magazine 5 stars, James and Andrew turn their attention to three violin sonatas all composed around the years of World War I. The Sibelius Berceuse also dates from the war years when Finland was isolated from the rest of Europe. Sibelius was short of money and busy writing the 6th and 7th symphonies, and planning his 8th...the six short pieces of op79 were attractive to publishers who were wary of large scale works with little chance of commercial return during the hostilities.

Debussy would die in 1918 and had like Elgar composed very little during the conflict. 'I want to work,' he wrote to his publisher Durand, 'not so much for myself, as to provide a proof, however small, that thirty million Boches can't destroy French thought...' Elgar told a friend 'I cannot do any real work with the awful shadow hanging over us' he said. Suffering from ill health, Elgar wrote the sonata in Sussex where a copse of gnarled lightning ravaged dead trees near his house on the South Downs inspired him to embark on three late great chamber works. Respighi's sonata inhabits an heroic late romantic almost 'Brahmsian' world, seemingly unscathed by the devastation of the 'War to end all wars'.