![]() The piano-only introduction tells us immediately that this is the Florent Schmitt of sass and irony, replete with nervous energy and spikey rhythms. To be sure, this is a lengthy sonata: a half-hour long, two-movement work that exploits the full range of sonorities, with a magnificent rhapsodic interplay between the violin and piano in the first movement, titled Lent sans exagération. In the second movement that follows without a break – titled Animé – we are treated to completely different atmospherics. I agree with all three writers’ perspectives. It demands tremendous virtuosity from performers but even more than that, they must focus on the deeper meaning of the music to bring out both its vigor and its tenderness - this restraint which translates to what we could call its ‘interiority.'” “The two instruments have an equally important - and perilous - role in this work which associates them closely, sometimes to unite them and sometimes to oppose their timbres. René Dumesnil (1879-1967), a French physician, literary critic and and musicologist who was the music critic for the Le Monde newspaper from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Le Monde music critic René Dumesnil wrote these words about the Sonate libre in 1958: The tremendously hard-cutting edge of the violin’s soaring lines is matched by the piano textures - ranging from abrupt percussive outbursts of dance rhythms to sparkling, harmonically advanced impressionistic sonoroties.” Composed in the Pyrenees in 1918-19, it is music of a truly Hispanic explosiveness and volatility, whose astonishing improvisatory freedom of form is handled with a firm underlying control throughout its half-hour duration. “With the formidable Sonate libre … an extraordinary stylistic transformation has taken place. ![]() Writing in The Musical Times in 1993, the British musicologist and biographer of Vincent d’Indy, Andrew Thomson, described Schmitt’s Sonata as follows: The French novelist and musicologist Benoît Duteurtre has written that the Sonata’s title “perfectly sums up the spirit of a work that is at the same time magnificently constructed and astonishingly free in expression.” He likens the style to Olivier Messiaen’s early works that were to come along a number of years later. A vintage copy of the Sonate libre score by Florent Schmitt (1919). ![]()
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