Max Reger's last two violin sonatas are recorded here by the Swiss duo, Hansheinz Schneeberger (born in 1926, a pupil of Carl Flesch, leader of the NDR orchestra in Hamburg between 1958 and 1961, and a distinguished soloist and chamber music player), and the pianist and composer Jean-Jacques Dunki (born in 1948), both members of the teaching staff at the Music Academy in Basel.
The E minor, No. 6, dates from 1911 and comprises a restless, harmonically and rhythmically unsettled opening movement, a sardonic scherzo, a gentle Adagio, and a long, elaborate finale. No. 7 in C minor was completed in 1915, a year before Reger's untimely death at the age of 43, after a substantial revision which involved completing the two central movements (now a tender Largo and a whimsical scherzo) and reversing their sequence, and replacing the original first movement with a completely new one in order to balance the weight of the finale, the last of Reger's various pieces in variation form. Reger described the sonata to his publisher Simrock as ''without doubt the best chamber music I have written to date''; stylistically it is leaner and more forward-looking than its heavily late-romantic predecessor.
Both sonatas play for over 35 minutes (despite Egon Wellesz's description, in Cobbett, of Op. 139 as ''concise''!) and they need—and deserve—close acquaintance. I cannot imagine them being more persuasively played than they are here.'