(++++) ARRANGED AND REARRANGED

Prokofiev: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Five Melodies for Violin and Piano. Bruno Monteiro, violin; João Paulo Santos, piano. Et’cetera Records. $15. 

Gaspard Le Roux: Complete Suites. Daniel-Ben Pienaar, piano. AVIE. $24.99 (2 CDs). 

     Prokofiev wrote only two violin-and-piano sonatas, and their genesis is fraught with complexity. No. 2 in D, Op. 94a, was written first, in 1942 – and was originally the Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op. 94; hence the “a” (or “bis”) in the violin sonata’s published number. Prokofiev arranged this work for violin in 1943. No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80, was started as early as 1938 but not finished until 1946, and has the rather dubious but apt distinction of being used at Prokofiev’s funeral, at which David Oistrakh, the prime mover of both violin sonatas, performed its first and third movements. A very fine new recording of the sonatas by Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos also includes a third violin-and-piano work that originated in different form: the Five Melodies, Op. 35bis, were vocalises, wordless songs, that Prokofiev wrote for soprano Nina Koshetz in 1920 and subsequently, in 1925, arranged in violin-and-piano form (hence the “bis” in the numbering). The oddities of their history notwithstanding, the three works on this Et’cetera CD communicate very strongly, and very differently, when played with the care and sensitivity they receive here. The second sonata is the more popular and more accessible of the pair, written in classical style in four expressive movements that interestingly translate the music’s flute-based origin: the violin part, although highly virtuosic, is also replete with lyricism and elegance in passages that clearly reflect its origin for the wind instrument. Monteiro and Santos take a broad, relaxed and rather expansive view of the piece, although the music never bogs down: it flows, especially in the slower first and third movements, at a rather leisurely pace. But not all is sunlight mixed with occasional bravura here: touches of the Prokofiev astringency do appear from time to time, and the performers give them their due. Still, it is the underlying pleasantness of the music that pervades this performance. And Monteiro and Santos provide as strong a contrast as possible between the second sonata and the first. No. 1 is a dark, restive, disturbing work in four movements of nearly equal length, and contains slithering violin scales in the first and last movement that Prokofiev, according to Oistrakh, likened to “wind passing through a graveyard.” An anecdote from the work’s 1946 première, which Prokofiev supervised, had pianist Lev Oborin playing a forte passage too gently for the composer’s liking, with Prokofiev telling Oborin that the sound should make people jump in their seats and wonder if the composer had lost his mind. The sonata’s effects are less startling some 80 years later, but this is still a work of deep disquiet, and in retrospect the music seems to agonize over the dead of World War II and/or those killed in Stalin’s purges – though Prokofiev never suggested either such interpretation. In any case, Monteiro and Santos approach the work as a study in extremes, starting at the very beginning with growling octaves at the bottom of the piano contrasted with wisps of violin sound. Throughout, these performers find the intensity and conflict on which this sonata is built, exploring the music with polished skill while at the same time allowing it a kind of rough-hewn drama that proves both disturbing and emotionally convincing. Then, after the intensity and expansiveness of the sonatas, the Five Melodies serve as a set of soft and lyrical encores. They are certainly not pervasively quiet: No. 3, Animato ma non allegro, is unsettled and restless throughout after beginning with a stormy fortissimo. But by and large, the mood is one of gentleness and even sweetness, as in the opening Andante – although there is a certain puckishness here and there, notably in the fourth and shortest of the miniatures, Allegretto leggero e scherzando. These little pieces, like the second sonata, may have had their origin outside the violin-and-piano literature, but Monteiro and Santos show convincingly – in these works as well as the challenging first sonata – just how well they fit the realm of distinctive and distinguished 20^th-century chamber music. 

     The arrangements are by the performer, not the composer, on a new two-disc AVIE release featuring the music of the decidedly obscure Gaspard Le Roux. Born around 1670 and living only until sometime in 1706, Le Roux was a French harpsichordist known to posterity for a single publication, Pieces de Clavessin, which appeared in 1705. Le Roux never called his groupings of these works “Suites,” but performers tend to title them that way, as does Daniel-Ben Pienaar in producing versions of the music for the modern piano. This is at best a questionable endeavor – the music of Le Roux fits the harpsichord so intimately that moving the material to the piano makes even less aural sense than doing so with the keyboard works of Bach and others. However, taken at face value, what Pienaar has done here is interesting. The pieces show up in their original publication in multiple guises, some for solo harpsichord, some for harpsichord duet, some as trio sonatas. Many of the works are tiny, lasting less than a minute or just a bit longer, but one, Sarabande en 12 Couplets, runs more than 12 minutes and is masterfully developed and presented as a harpsichord exploration and exercise (Le Roux appears to have used these pieces as teaching materials). Pienaar uses the rather chaotic state of the 1705 publication as carte blanche to produce piano works that borrow liberally from and build substantially upon the original material: sometimes solo and trio versions of the same material are blended for pianistic purposes, sometimes repeats of elements are varied by including within them material from other elements, and so on. This makes for an intriguing intellectual exercise and a near-90-minute presentation that is nothing if not impressive both in structure and in performance. The whole enterprise, though, is somewhat quixotic: the numerous charms that Le Roux wrote into these preludes, menuets, passepieds, courantes, sarabandes, gavottes, allemandes and gigues are all smeared together into pieces that, although undeniably charming, sound simply weird on a modern piano, no matter how skillfully they are played. Pienaar is in fact committed to making considerable use of the piano’s capabilities to produce sounds of varying volume and to sustain a portion of a piece beneath another of its elements. The result is music presented pianistically that sounds like a conflation of eras, not just of instruments. That is, of course, inevitable when performing Baroque keyboard material on a modern piano, but Pienaar is not even the slightest bit apologetic about what he is doing: he is painting a modern musical canvas with 300+-year-old raw materials. There is nothing particularly “right” or “wrong” about handling Le Roux and his time period this way; it is a matter of taste. There is, however, a distinct air of strangeness that hangs over this entire performance: the music that Le Roux created is very much of its era in ways that keyboard works by Bach, at least arguably, are not. Pienaar’s creativity is evident throughout these arrangements and his performances of them, but the creativity of Le Roux himself is largely absent. This (+++) release is a curiosity of modernity built upon a curiosity of much earlier times; for better or worse, it is ultimately neither wholly of now nor wholly of then.