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Mozart, Prokofiev, Beethoven and Martinů: Julia Fischer (violin), Malina Cheryavska (piano), Laeiszhalle, Hamburg, 21.3.2009 (TKT)

Mozart: Sonata in C Minor, K296
Prokofiev: Sonata No. 1 in F minor, op.80
Beethoven: Sonata in G Major, op.30/1
Martinů: Sonata No.3, H303


She was going to be the star of the evening: Julia Fischer, darling of audiences and critics alike. At 25 years of age, the daughter of a Slovakia-born pianist and a German mathematician father already has achieved more than others dare dream of during their entire career: numerous honors and awards, widely hailed recordings, and enthusiastically received concerts with some of the internationally most renowned orchestras and conductors in the world’s major concert halls. She was admitted to Munich’s Academy of Music when she was nine, and at age 23 became Germany’s youngest professor.

It did not take her long to convince the audience that all the accolades are well deserved, thanks to the sheer musicality of her violin playing, which almost made you not even notice her impeccable technique. And yet, Fischer did everything she could not to be the star of the evening, always yielding to her Ukrainian partner Milana Chernyavska whenever the music so dictated. Chernyavska, in turn, is such a remarkable pianist, it became clear throughout that the piano was equal to the violin and by no means meant as pure accompaniment.

For most of Mozart’s C minor sonata the piano is even the main instrument. No earth-shattering piece of music, it is still lovely and pretty, and fortunately was played without the Viennese coffee house schmaltz so often heard – a perfect beginning to an evening dedicated not to ego but to music.

The mood shifted very quickly. Prokofiev began his Fminor sonata in 1938, two years after he returned to the Soviet Union following 18 years of voluntary exile and one year before the outbreak of Word War II. He completed it in 1946, a year after the end of the war. To add to the historical catastrophe, in 1945 Prokofiev suffered a head injury which was to affect him for the rest of his life. His sonata – excruciatingly difficult for both instruments, and premiered by David Oistrakh and the composer himself – is surely one of the most intense pieces of music imaginable: grim and resolute, gloomy, harried, full of anguish and passion, pain and despair, often like film music, but luckily without a film to distract from the power of the music. During a rehearsal Prokofiev reportedly said that he wanted audiences to wonder if he was out of his mind – to which the correct answer would be: No doubt about it, but fortunately so, and only temporarily. He described passages from the first and fourth movements as “wind passing through a graveyard” – hauntingly rendered by the duo – and the first and third movement were played at the composer’s funeral. What a monumental work, and how intensely performed by Fischer and Chernyavska, who were so in tune with each other, they formed a whole even when they seemed to be in different galaxies in this desolate piece.

Beethoven composed his G major sonata also at a time of personal upheaval, in 1802, the year he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament after discovering that he was losing his hearing. Even so, his crisis did not enter into this sonata with its many carefree passages. The work also contains distinct folkloristic elements, as does the last work performed, Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s third sonata. Written at a time of not personal but global crisis, in late 1944, it is nonetheless full of momentum and charged with energy. Influenced by Expressionism as well as Impressionism, it also contains jazz idioms – a work not well known but extremely effective and uplifting, not least thanks to Fischer and Chernyavska’s bravura interpretation.

Thomas K Thornton


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