The Sonata for Violin and Piano from 1927 stands a world away from the Gallic romanticism of the first; its jazzy irreverence exploits the differences in timbre between violin and piano, striking and plucking and bowing notes, respectively. The dynamic contrasts filter through the four main themes of the first movement, which occasionally alludes to The Child Among the Sorceries. Pasquier’s lovely tone sails over the piano in the recapitulation. The Blues section could be taken for Gershwin, as the violin plucks and strums like a guitar or a banjo in a minstrel show. Having two keys sound at once further grates upon the nerves of our conservatism. The last movement has our two collaborators in a fervent moto perpetuo, not too far away from Rimsky-Korsakov’s bumblebee.
Ravel’s Kaddish (1914) transcribes the first of his Deux Melodies Hebraiques; this, a lovely, extended prayer for the dead that originated in the 13th Century. A series of plaintive melismas asks Pasquier to sustain a liturgical orison with a firm, pliant line. But the real virtuoso test comes in Tzigane (1924), the perennial show-stopper composed for Jelly d’Aranyi. After a long, contemplative solo cadenza, Pasquier and Engerer enter a devil’s labyrinth of colors and bravura techniques, often hued in the manner of Bartok’s glissandi, double notes, and jolting accelerations. The Meno vivo grandioso is nothing less than Liszt and Paganini transmogrified into an explosion of French audacities. The 1895 Habanera translates the Basque landscape into a mediation, edited by Fritz Kreisler. A throbbing pedal point informs the lush but restrained, exotic heat of the piece, nuanced with hints of oriental, Moorish sensuality. The 1922 homage to teacher Gabriel Faure takes a page from Schumann’s anagrams and converts the entire name to a sequence of 12 notes. The muted violin interacts with the piano’s different key, leading to the kind of subtle polyphony Faure relished, the whole veiled in azure colors.
— Gary Lemco
