ANASTASIA KOBEKINA / ISATA KANNEH-MASON

The Sonata for Cello and Piano, one of Debussy’s last works, was composed in the tragic climate of the First World War. Yet the work exudes a feeling of great freedom. Poetic fantasy and droll outbursts are sprinkled throughout this varied work, which is not without patriotic overtones, as evidenced by the ‘Ouverture à la française’, inherited from Lully, that opens the Sonata. 

Clara Schumann’s Romances and her husband Robert’s Fantasiestücke are based on the same aesthetic, somewhere between Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The fantastical accents take Robert’s music to a stranger, more inventive side, while the elegance of Clara’s rhetorical construction makes her Romances a marvellous listening experience, somewhere between opera and chamber music. 

Inherited from pieces composed for solo organ, Nadia Boulanger’s Three Pieces retain their apparent austerity. Nevertheless, in the gentle serenity of the first piece and the melancholy of the second, we sense the influence of Gabriel Fauré, Nadia Boulanger’s composition teacher at the Conservatoire. The third piece emancipates itself from the meditative side to become a virtuoso dance with Iberian accents. 

Franck’s Violin Sonata was not originally conceived specifically for the violin. There is in fact a version of the first movement written entirely for cello, while sketches for viola also exist! This seminal work of French Romantic chamber music needs no introduction, but it seems to be quite relevant in this programme. The work indeed combines, under the fingers of Anastasia Kobekina and Isata Kanneh-Mason, Debussy’s impressionistic refinement, Schumann’s fantasia and Boulanger’s meditative depth.