Poulenc never fails for me and is in a bracket of great C20th composers in behind Shostakovich, who I'm increasingly convinced is the greatest. There is something of his tonalities in the Violin Sonata but Poulenc's structure is less formal, the changing tempi offering serenity amid the agitation. The second movement, tres lent et calme, is welcome respite with the piano following happily rather than challenging the violin. Kopatchinskaya- and Leschenko for that matter- is flash, zippy and passionate and doesn't let herself or the listener rest for long.
By way of light relief, the piano has Dohnanyi's arrangement of the Waltz from Delibes' Coppelia, which might have been placed after the Bartok because we don't quite need it just yet. An exuberant arrangement, almost syncopated, Leschenko is flighty, as in 'in flight', and flamboyant.
The Bartok Violin Sonata no. 2, Sz.76 is a darker thing altogether. Poulenc, Bartok and Ravel all now have their own designated cataloguers and it's not just Mozart's Kochel numbers, Schubert's D's and Bach's BWV's. Being from 1922, one can't help but be aware this is contemporary with The Waste Land and it's tempting to hear it as a soundtrack to that post-WW1 zeitgeist. Distraught, fractured pizzicato is not the least of the singnifiers of bleak grief and an inability to come to terms, if that is what Bartok was thinking. The piano part is as disturbed as the wide-ranging neurosis of the violin. before the piece disappears higher and more remote than Vaughan-Williams's ascended lark but this is no good as background music or easy listening, it demands concentration.
Ravel and his French contempoaries shouldn't be conveniently pigeon-holed with Impressionist painters as simplistic sorts like me sometimes try to do. Tzigane is based on gypsy and folk music but seen through a Modernist prism and more Cubist than Impressionist, sharper and less easy. It's always been there but not previously been a favourite of mine. This recording might make it more familiar and help to asssimilate it.
I was expecting something 'wild' and invigorating and wasn't disappointed in that. But in places, especially the Bartok, it was more harrowing than the bohemian image that the ladies project led me to believe. I'm not at all surprised it had such glowing reviews at the time of its release.
