Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano Mvt I - Allegretto ben Moderato by César Franck (live)

A live performance in April of 2024 in Grant Recital Hall, UMKC Campus

Piano - Dan Velicer

Recording Engineer - @DawsonColemanSax

The marriage of violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and Louise Bourdeau in 1886 inspired Franck’s lone Violin Sonata. Like Franck, Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was born in Liège. A composer himself, he became a champion of the newest French music. (In addition to Franck’s Sonata, the Concerto and Poème by Chausson and Debussy’s String Quartet are dedicated to him.) Although 64 years old in 1886, Franck was still known primarily as an organist – at the important church St. Clotilde and the lavish public arts palace the Trocadéro, as well as professor of organ at the Conservatory. The recognition that he gained in the last years of his life, and then increasingly afterwards, was due in large part to the fervent missionary work of supporters such as Ysaÿe. The violinist played Franck’s Sonata many times on his wide-ranging tours, telling his listeners that he played it “con amore” since it was a wedding present.

Franck originally intended the opening movement to be slow and reflective, but Ysaÿe persuaded him that it worked best at a quicker tempo, so Franck marked it Allegretto, though with the qualifier “ben moderato.” The movement juxtaposes rather than develops two themes, the first given almost exclusively to the violin, the second to the piano. These themes, particularly the violin’s, will return in the following movements, a sort of cyclical recontextualizing that Franck picked up from Liszt.

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