YSAŸE 6 Sonatas for solo violin Op 27

New signing for Harmonia Mundi: Chicago violinist Murray

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Eugène (Auguste) Ysaÿe

Genre:

Instrumental

Label: Harmonia Mundi

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 68

Mastering:

Stereo
DDD

Catalogue Number: HMU907569

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
(6) Sonatas for Solo Violin Eugène (Auguste) Ysaÿe, Composer
Eugène (Auguste) Ysaÿe, Composer
Tai Murray, Violin
Ysaÿe dedicated each of these sonatas to a different, then-famous, performer-friend, and each is wildly different in character as a result. Running through all of them is his rapacious interest in the relationship between his influences, and everything is thrown into the melting pot – Debussy, jazz, folk – resulting in a disc that makes me want to hear Tai Murray playing all of them, so coherently has she pulled them together.

Above all, though, the ghost of Bach is never far from these pieces and it takes a weighty player to support his presence in the wings without leaving the music to lose its own identity. So much of the Solo Partitas is in here, and the yearning Murray creates by way of her seamless lines is heart-wrenching: she has quite rightly identified them as all-important in music that can kaleidoscope from post-Bach to pre-Ligeti sounds within a single phrase, managing to draw out just how exciting this music is in its own right from a repertoire where it is often pigeonholed as niche study music for the advanced student.

In recorded music these days it ought to go without saying that all these performances are perfectly tuned but I’m going to draw attention to it anyway: the perfection of Murray’s intonation, especially in the many virtuoso passages of fast-moving, random intervals of no predictable pattern, has tipped so far over into another league of accuracy that it adds an extra dimension of enjoyment to an already superlative disc.

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