Star Rating: ***
Niels Gade today has few champions outside Scandinavia, but here, in no fewer than four recitals, the RSAMD is giving us a belated glimpse of his music in conjunction with that of relevant composers. Even with Grieg, Mendelssohn and Brahms in the programme, however, the audience for Isabelle van Keulen and Ronald Brautigam's recital for violin and piano was dismally small.
Was it this or Gade's D minor Violin Sonata, perhaps unfairly placed right at the start of the programme, which made Keulen sound initially so distrait? Certainly, the edginess of her tone in the first movement did Gade no favours, but the piece as a whole could only be said to lack individuality in this performance.
But it did have one good, if unintentional, effect, which was to make Grieg sound more Griegian, Mendelssohn more Mendelssohnian and Brahms more Brahmsian. And Grieg's F minor Violin Sonata, Op 8, No 1, supplied the first evidence that here was a partnership with something to say. The work itself is a Nordic delight, though almost as neglected as the Gade. However, it was in Mendelssohn's passionately melodious, urgent and cogent F minor Violin Sonata, Op 4 - another rarity - that the recital, recorded for Radio 3, really took wing.
Finally, Brahms's G major Violin Sonata, Op 78, brought things into popular territory with a performance in which the inhibitions of the Gade were at last banished and the music spoke with surging, soaring eloquence and richness of expression, with a melodiousness which, in the Gade, had merely been hinted at.
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