The most striking features of Isabelle Faust’s Gramophone Award-winning first Bartok CD for Harmonia Mundi (3/97) were an empathetic spirit and a fiery temperament. Here, as there, Faust exhibits a defining use of nuance and inflection. The earlier CD featured the earthen First Sonata whereas this long-awaited successor is programmed around the tauter, folk-music-derived Second Sonata.
The Sonata’s two contrasting movements call for a near-schizoid adaptability to changing moods. In the restless Molto moderato first movement Faust suggests feelings of sensual insinuation, though the lacerating attack of her bow at 3'50'' has real grit. As the music grows more agitated, she follows suit and her pianist-partner Florent Boffard brooks no compromise in his handling of Bartok’s dissonant chordal writing.
The Allegretto second movement approximates the ‘friss’ faster section of a Hungarian rhapsody. Faust lands the transition from the first movement on a racy glissando, makes great play with the dancing accelerations from 3'58'' and calms from orgasmic thrashing at 9'59'' to the sky-borne diminuendo of the closing bars. The Sonata’s musical contours have rarely sounded better focused.
Rivals are unexpectedly plentiful. Anne-Sophie Mutter is honey and cream next to Faust’s chilli and paprika, the Stanzeleit/Fenyo and Pauk/Jando partnerships provide idiomatic though rather less striking options, and while Gidon Kremer (in his second recording, the one with Oleg Maisenberg) comes nearest to Faust in spirit, not everyone will gravitate to his chosen couplings (Enesco, Schulhoff, etc).
Faust offers feisty, high-kicking accounts of the two 1928 Rhapsodies, the Second being both the more exotic of the two and the more responsive to interpretative innovation. The stamping ‘second part’ recalls the orchestral Dance Suite of five years earlier and Faust invests it both with delicacy and a palpably rustic ‘edge’ (she all but ‘swings it’ from 1'27''). The popular Romanian Folkdances provide a tuneful encore sequence (again, beautifully played), though hardly a generous one given that the disc’s total timing adds up to a mere 46 minutes. This is indeed a marvellous CD, competitively priced, and a worthy follow-up to its widely celebrated predecessor.'