Juilliard Sonatenabend: Respighi, Poulenc and Grieg

The temperature was in the 70's on Thursday afternoon, but there was no air conditioning at Juilliard when I arrived for the Sonatenabend recital at Paul Hall.  The theater was fairly well filled and the air in the room soon became stuffy and unpleasant.

The program opened with Ottorino Respighi's Violin Sonata in B minor, P. 110 (1916-1917) as performed by Samuel Katz, violin, and Katalan Terrell, piano.  This was actually the first performance I can recall having heard of a Respighi chamber work.  Although the sonata was written at roughly the same time as the composer's much more famous tone poem  Fontane di Roma, it bears no relationship to the other work.  It is classical in its three-movement form but, especially in the second movement marked andante espressivo, romantic in character.  The third movement, marked allegro moderato ma energico, is actually a Baroque passacaglia.

The Respighi was followed by the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, FP 184 (1962) by Francis Poulenc.  The musicians were clarinetist Narek Arutyunian and pianist Valeriya Polunina.  Coincidentally, I had seen a performance of the sonata earlier this year in a Chamber Music Society webcast that featured David Shifrin and Gloria Chien.  This was one of Poulenc's last works.  He had been scheduled to play at the premiere with clarinetist Benny Goodman, who had commissioned the work, but unfortunately died shortly before the performance; his place at the piano was then taken by Leonard Bernstein.  Since the composer's passing was unanticipated - he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 62 - there is nothing of a valediction in this work.  Ironically, it had been intended as a memorial for another composer, Arthur Honegger.

The next work was Edvard Grieg's Violin Sonata No. 2 in G major, Op. 13 (1867).   It was performed by violinist Daniel Cho and pianist Sora Jung.  While Grieg's first violin sonata was firmly in the Romantic tradition and in particular showed the influence of Robert Schumann, the composer was a Norwegian nationalist and in his second sonata turned to his country's folk tradition as a source of musical inspiration.  The fact that Grieg was on his honeymoon when he wrote the sonata may have had a great deal to do with its generally genial character.

By this point the program had already lasted over an hour and the temperature had become decidedly uncomfortable.  The musicians on stage had it the worst.  They had to pause after virtually each movement to wipe away the sweat.  Along with a good part of the rest of the audience, I left before the performance of the next work.

For the record, the remaining pieces on the program were Tansman's Sonatine for Bassoon and Piano to be performed by bassoonist Felix Ren and pianist Ho Jae Lee, and Saint-Saens's Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75 to be performed by Hahnsol Kim, violin, and Jinhee Park, piano.