Music for solo violin

Naji Hakim Sonata for Solo Violin (1995) 1 I Precipitato 1:49 2 II Andante quasi recitative 9:42 3 III Allegro con spirit 4:25

David Matthews Fuga (1999) 4 Largo 4:12

David Matthews Three Studies, Op. 36 (1986) 5 I Andante appassionato 1:43 6 II Vivo e fantastic 4:46 7 III Lento 5:05

Dmitri Smirnov Two Fugues, Op. 6 (1970) 8 I Andante 4:17 9 II Moderato 3:54

Hans Werner Henze Étude Philharmonique (1981) 10 6:52

Hans Werner Henze Serenade (1986) 11 4:01

Hans Werner Henze Sonata for Solo Violin (1978, revised 1993) 12 I ‘Tirsi’ – Allegretto (With leisure and bonhomie) 5:23 13 II ‘Mopso’ – With rustic grace 9:05 14 III ‘Aristeo’ 3:02

Total CD duration 68:21

Peter Sheppard Skærved

Four Composers. Four Approaches.

By itself, the violin is an unsatisfactory instrument. It has a limited tessitura, and cannot really provide bass ‘underpinning’ to melodic material. It has only four strings, and only two of those can be played comfortably at any one time. It is limited in terms of accuracy, speed and dynamics, and has no sustaining pedal. Without the company of other instruments, it exposes the audience to the player’s inadequacies, writ large. It is always ready to collapse into silence. But for these very reasons, composers and performers who are less easily intimidated have been drawn to it, in the pre-classical era, and in ever increasing numbers in the past century, as a medium of near-ideal directness and humanity.

My first contact with Naji Hakim was in 1998, when he and I improvised together in St Giles Cripplegate. This was not a planned collaboration; we were both simply taking part in the same event. However, I was not going to pass up the chance of locking horns with the greatest improviser at the organ since Messaien. I have no memory of the musical substance of our work, and despite it having been recorded, I am not sure that I would want to hear it. However I do remember finding myself tangling with a harmonic sensibility of superfine subtlety, somehow concealing a certain wildness, not so much suppressed as subsumed. This contradiction seems to lie at the heart of much of Hakim's music, and the astonishingly eclectic Violin Sonata is a perfect illustration of this unique balance.

Dmitri Smirnov’s 2 Fugues were written nearly a quarter of a century ago, when the composer was studying in Moscow. The actual first performance was not until 1994, when I shocked the composer, by unwittingly premiering this work, which he had never heard publicly played. Smirnov has come up with a number of devices to solve the voice-leading problem in writing thus for a solo instrument. The most original and interesting, and to a degree antithetical to the spirit of equality fundamental to the conventions of contrapuntal writing, is his use of instrumental ‘colour separation’. In a chamber situation, musicians playing contrapuntal music will, in general, aspire to produce as matched a sound and line as possible. Ironically, in order to achieve textual delineation, Smirnov has synthesised the effect of several unmatched performers, as each voice has its own very distinctive colour or performance technique.

David Matthews’ Fugue 1999 is in part a reaction to my fascination with the polyphonic and contrapuntal possibilities of the violin. David had been particularly struck by the fugue of the Bach G minor Sonata BWV 1001, which I had performed in a concert on the South Bank. However, he

was also struck by Bach’s unwillingness to attempt a four part fugue for solo violin. The night of the concert in question, I returned to my apartment to relax. The fax machine started to whirr, and the first few bars of a fugue in four parts scrolled out. I picked up the violin and played them into David’s answerphone, with the quip, ‘now you will have to write the whole thing’. David and I have had an interesting dialogue since the completion of the piece, as to whether or not this should be considered to be a piece of pastiche. David had composed the work very much in what he felt was the spirit of Bach; however, the technical means necessary to execute this piece are very far from the 18th century, and in fact are far more closely related to the spirit of Antoine Ysaÿe. This may actually be more to do with the fact that David’s concept of Bach performance is that of someone who grew up listening to performances of baroque music in the ‘grand manner’. His was perhaps the last generation not to have been conditioned by the expectations and questions thrown up by the authentic movement.

The Three Studies could have been written for a different instrument altogether. Commissioned as test pieces by the Carl Flesch competition, they explore a far more traditionally virtuosic approach to the violin. The interesting thing is that the impetus for the works is an achievable technical perfection, as opposed to the transcendent one to which the Fugue aspires. The language is consequently far more descriptive and evocative, making reference to a wide range of sound worlds, from the bird calls of Britten’s Third Quartet to the Three Pieces for solo clarinet of Stravinsky.

Hans Werner Henze’s solo Violin Sonata is one of the most original and musically challenging works to be written for the instrument since the Bartók solo sonata delivered a sharp wake-up call to violinists in 1945. It is recorded here in a recent revision, made in 1993. When I first saw this revised version, I was aghast – a third of the piece seemed to have disappeared. On closer examination, I realised that Henze had re-evaluated the work in the light of his more recent compositional priorities. This excited me, for as an interpreter, I have always suspected that the compositional act was close to an interpretation, even a performance, per se, of an unheard work. Henze's rewriting of this work is very much the ‘voice of experience’ coming back to an earlier outpouring, and reinterpreting the initial impulse, curbing some excesses, releasing others. This is certainly a process that carried over into Henze’s work as a conductor. I came to see the revision as a highly necessary re-evaluation of the piece by Henze as a performer-composer, in the light of the heightened lyric, structural and theatrical priorities of his recent music.

The majority of Henze’s music has drama at the core, and the pieces here are no exception. However, there is always an implicit challenge to the performer. When every work is so laden with character, multiple narrative and dramatic reference, what of this should the player attempt to convey? This is not a problem in a work such as the Second Violin Concerto, where it is quite clear that the violinist is Munchausen, mocking Gödel.

The problem in a work like the Violin Sonata is one of ‘Point of View’: the work is based on the folk offshoots of the commedia dell’arte tradition. Each of the movements ‘is’ a character, Tirsi, Mopso. or Aristeo. As well as being personalised, each of the pieces articulates a drama in which the character is either participant, or precipitates. Onto this is projected musical material that implies other approaches to the theatrical tradition, be it explicit quotes from Monteverdi or oblique articulations of Haydn-esque bucolicism.

Charles Palliser has written on a similar issue in his theoretical fantasy, Betrayals. He talks of passive and active texts, and consequently requires passive and active readers, either to activate a reading, or to be read by, or interfered with, by the text. It might seem extremely fanciful to treat music as if it were crime writing, but there is an obvious similarity; both require direct involvement with the listener/reader, before the reader can be drawn into their sticky web of delusion and development.

It is gratifying to be able to include a piece of Henze’s ‘pure’ music, the Serenade, on this disc. I am sure that he would not have seen it like that. I know that he was somewhat dismissive of the various ‘omaggi’ and pièces d'occasions that he has written over the years. This work was written for the 75th birthday of Yehudi Menuhin. The only piece of theatre in the work is the implied setting; obviously nocturnal, maybe Italian, in any case full of Mediterranean languor. Henze himself referred to it, curiously, as ‘that piece in D major’, as if admitting a weakness.

Every composer knows that they are in dialogue with other voices, even if they reject them. The Henze Étude is drawn from a work that uses this dialectic as its dramatic core. Il Vitalino Raddopiato, for violin and chamber orchestra, is an imaginary meeting between Henze and the composer Vitali, represented by the entirety of his famous Ciaconna. In Henze’s paraphrase the composers converse, trade banter and insults, finally falling into a drunken brawl, which is curtailed by an extended Cadenza for the solo violin. The Étude Philharmonique is an extended version of this cadenza, out of its dramatic context. As with all true solo writing for the violin, it exists in that place where the most extreme theatricality is abstracted and distilled into poetry.

©1999 Peter Sheppard Skærved

Peter Sheppard Skærved is the dedicatee of over 300 works for solo violin, by composers including Hans Werner Henze, Judith Weir, Michael Finnissy and Poul Ruders. He is the leader of the pioneering Kreutzer Quartet, Viotti Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, and regularly tours in over 30 countries. He curated a large scale exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2011, and is at present collaborating on projects with the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Library of Congress, Washington DC. He is the only living violinist to have performed on Paganini, Viotti, Kreisler, Ole Bull and Joachim’s violins. For more information and live recordings, go to www.peter-sheppard-skaerved.com

This recording was made in St. Mary’s Church, Southampton on 22 & 23 May, 1998 (except track 4, at St. Mary’s Church, Dinton on 28 June 1999 Cover image © Nicholas Morgan. Copyright image used with permission. All rights reserved. Booklet and packaging design (2nd printing): Stephen Sutton Recording Producer/Sound Engineer/Digital Editor: David Lefeber Violins: W.E. Hill 1903 and Stradivarius 1734 ‘Habenek’ Music Copyrights: Hakim: SDRM Matthews: Faber Music Ltd. Smirnov: Copyright Control Henze: GEMA/Schott & Co. Ltd.

℗ 2000 Metier Sound & Vision Ltd. © 2018 Divine Art Ltd, Metier division

Peter Sheppard Skærved with Aaron Shorr (piano) Beethoven Explored – The Violin Sonatas in their musical context

Vol. 1 – G major Sonata, Op. 96, “Marriage of Figaro” Variations and Variations in F by Archduke Rudolph MSVCD 2003 Vol. 2 – A major Sonata, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer’), 6 Deutsche Tanze and Sonata in E flat by Josef Mayseder MSVCD2004 Vol. 3 – Three Sonatas, Op. 30 and Variations on Barbe Bleu by Franz Clement MSVCD2005 Vol. 4 – Sonatas, Op. 23 and Op. 24 and Sonata in C minor, Op. 38 by Ferdinand Ries MSVCD2006 Vol. 5 – Sonatas, Op. 12 and the Sonata Op. 9 No. 2 by Andreas Romberg MSVCD 2007 Vol. 6 – The Chamber Eroica – original version for piano quartet MSVCD 2008

Peter Sheppard Skærved – solo violin

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And check out the first two volumes of ‘The Great Violins’

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