Paul Juon (1872-1940)
Chamber Music for Viola
Viola Sonata in D major, Op 15 (1901)
Viola Sonata in F minor, Op 82a (1924)
Romanze for viola and piano, Op 7b (1898)
Silhouettes, second series, Op 43, for violin, viola and piano (1909)
Trio-Miniatures for violin, viola and piano (1920)
Basil Vendryes (viola), Igor Pikayzen (violin), William David (piano)
rec. 2021, Mathie Music Salon, Glendale, Colorado, USA
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0389 [67]
Juon’s Russo-German background can be fully felt in his chamber music for viola. He was a pupil of Arensky and Taneyev in Moscow but then moved to Berlin where he studied with Woldemar Bargiel, Clara Schumann’s half-brother, and himself the recipient of an increasing number of recordings lately.
He was a late-Romantic par excellence and the viola works allow one to eavesdrop on his rich, ripe and appealing compositions. The Viola Sonata published in 1901, though clearly couched in a slightly nostalgic vein, is full of clever and diverting effects – such as the invigorating B section of the first movement – and in a rich cantabile second slow movement with its change of tempi for an ABA form. The distinctive modality of the finale comes with a real ease of execution, vividly conveyed by the performers on this recording. The F minor Sonata was published almost a quarter of a century later and is a modestly structured quarter-of-an-hour three-movement work. There is a degree of extra fluidity here, along with a more confident handling of motifs, and longer lines that ease into the music’s strong folkloric element with languid elegance. So too the contrastive exultant passagework; strongly handled and convincing. In the finale one returns to the opening movement’s material with a sense of natural cyclic development.
The Romanze is excerpted from the second movement of the Violin Sonata, Op 7 and offers a satisfyingly affecting example of his penchant for morceau. The second series of Silhouettes, Op 43 are written for two violins and piano or, as here, violin, viola and piano in which guise they appear in their premiere recording as a set. These are character pieces that marry charm with baroque procedure, salon elegance with a trio of Intermezzi, and end with a Danse grotesque, which offers more in the way of grotesquerie for the piano than the strings. The Trio-Miniaturen was published in 1920 and offers four compact pieces that are arrangements of much earlier pieces, all for piano. They are ingenious affairs, somewhat reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, and offer robustly witty examples of his art with the possible exception of the last, a rather more conventional Danse fantastique.
Toccata is well-known for its extensively annotated booklets and this is no exception. Derek Katz writes with precision and clear historical knowledge and he has delved into the early recorded history of Juon on 78s and into the Julius Block cylinders, in which one can hear Juon playing (review).
The recording quality has a strong close-up studio sound but what it loses in evocative shimmer it gains in clarity.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: Rob Barnett
