PRESS PROGRAMMES RECORDING VIDEOS PRESENTATION DIARY
Fanfare Magazine, 2025, Jerry Dubins
BRAHMS Violin Sonatas Nos. 1–3. Scherzo from the “F-A-E” Sonata ● Rachel Kolly (vn); Christian Chamorel ● INDESENS 032 (59:22)
***** (five stars)
(…) A while back, I announced that I would henceforth subtract points from any new recording of Brahms’s violin sonatas that did not include the Scherzo from the “F-A-E” Sonata. I would not add points, however, for including it, since doing so was only the right and proper thing to do. Therefore, I commend Rachel Kolly for including the Scherzo, but give her no extra points for it.
This is not Kolly’s first appearance in Fanfare. Three of her previous albums have been reviewed here by other contributors, and on two of them she was joined by the same pianist, Christian Chamorel, who now partners her in Brahms’s violin sonatas. Please note, however, that you will not find Kolly under the “Ks” in the Fanfare archive. Look for her instead under the “Ds,” in which you will find her listed as Rachel Kolly d’Alba. For professional reasons, she has dropped the d’Alba and now chooses to be known as Rachel Kolly, and so shall she be.
It goes without saying that with this Brahms release, Kolly enters a very crowded and very competitive field. Checking the Fanfare archive, I find a staggering 34 (!) recordings of the sonatas that I’ve reviewed myself, consistently finding the same four or five versions be my top choices. And they have been, in no particular order: Ulf Wallin with Roland Pöntinen, Nikolaj Znaider with Yefim Bronfman, Stefan Jackiw with Max Levinson, Mark Fewer with Peter Longworth, and Sergey Khachatryan with Lusine Khachatryan.
The interesting thing about this list is that with the possible exception of Znaider—who seems to have traded in his bow for a baton and now wishes to go by the name Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider—none of the other violinists I’ve named are what you’d call “standing-room-only,” box-office draws. And yet, they all seem to have a special feeling for the warmth and moods of intimacy and “setting-of-the-sun” introspection that much of this music conveys. But there’s explosive anger that rages through the last of the three sonatas, the D-Minor, op. 108, as well, and the above-named violinists project the pent-up fury with due intensity.
The 20-year-old Brahms must have been all aglow in October of 1853, when he met Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf, and was invited to participate in a collaborative project along with Schumann and Schumann’s student, Albert Dietrich. The project was to be a four-movement violin and piano sonata written for famed violinist Joseph Joachim and presented to him as a surprise gift when he came to visit the Schumanns later that month.
Schumann parceled out the assignments as follows: To Dietrich would go the heaviest lift to fulfill, the work’s large sonata-allegro first movement. Schumann would pen both the second movement, a short Intermezzo, and the finale. And to Brahms fell the task of composing the Scherzo, a form he’d already shown an affinity for with his EI-Minor Scherzo for solo piano, op. 4, of two years earlier.
Joachim arrived, as planned, and reports are that a good time was had by all—well, almost by all. It’s said that Clara felt left out of the male-bonding ritual, though it was she at the piano who joined Joachim that evening in playing the so-named “F-A-E” Sonata for the first time. The letters, by the way, stand for the motto, Frei aber einsam (Free but lonely). Schumann, who, as we know from other of his works, was fond of musical cryptograms—which I’m told has nothing to do with cryptocurrency—was the brain behind the “F-A-E” motto, though technically, I believe the motto to be an anagram rather than a cryptogram.
Each movement of the sonata is indeed based in one way or another on those three notes, but not always in that order. By definition, an anagram is the scrambling of the letters of a given word to form another word out of the same letters, as in cat/act or taste/state. Whereas a cryptogram is a puzzle that contains an encoded message or encrypted text. Schumann’s Carnaval is an example of a piece that contains cryptograms in which the names of the musical notes are ciphers for unlocking their encrypted meanings. In contrast, the “F-A-E” motto hides no secret message; rather, it’s merely a scrambling of letters/notes to produce a different word using the same letters/notes—e.g., ca/act…F-A-E/E-F-A.
That digression out of the way, Brahms’s Scherzo for the “F-A-E” Sonata takes on a degree of historical importance in light of the fact that despite it not being officially published until 1935, it’s the composer’s first known formal composition for violin and piano to survive cremation. It’s believed that Brahms had tried his hand at writing a violin sonata at least five times and incinerated the evidence of all of them before completing the first one he deemed worthy to live.
One could therefore say that Brahms came to the violin sonata genre fairly late in his career, for 25 years would pass after the Scherzo, before he took up the medium again in 1878–79, when he penned the first of his three numbered violin sonatas, the G-Major, op. 78, a latish entry in the composer’s catalog. It’s exactly contemporaneous with the Violin Concerto, op. 77, though the sonata is far more modest in its ambitions of scale as well as considerably more circumscribed and subdued in its emotional range. On the latter score, the sonata seems to take on some of the tone and mood of another proximate work of this same period, Brahms’s Second Symphony of 1877.
Few and far between in this First Sonata are passages of virtuosic display, as the lyrical element holds sway throughout. Woven into the thematic material of the work are two of the composer’s own songs, Regenlied (Rain Song), op. 59/3 and Nachklang (Memories), op. 59/4, which lend the music its feeling of a soft and gentle nostalgic longing. The first of the two songs, Regenlied, has, in fact, stuck to the piece as its nickname.
Eight more years would pass before Brahms took up the violin sonata medium again in the summer of 1886. The composer was vacationing in Thun in the Bernese Highlands region of Switzerland. If the lyrical element is foremost in the G-Major Sonata, it’s even more so now in the A-Major Sonata, op. 100. Song, in fact, is at its heart, with a number of Brahms’s songs finding themselves quoted or fleetingly referenced throughout the work.
The tempo-modifying adjectives for each of the sonata’s three movements set the overall tone and mood of the music: amabile, tranquillo, grazioso. From this, commentators have drawn the conclusion that Brahms was never happier, more relaxed, or more at peace with himself than he was on his Swiss holiday in 1886. But just as a summer squall can come suddenly and without warning, it would be well to remember that this same summer in Switzerland saw the composer’s very next work, the Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor, op. 101, a piece of dark and foul moods, of emotional angst and ominous premonitions. Enjoy the sunshine of the A-Major Sonata while it lasts, for Brahms’s mood of contentment didn’t last long. I doubt that he ever knew a truly happy day in his life.
That would seem to be confirmed by his next and final Violin Sonata in D Minor, op. 108. The violin part is more technically demanding and virtuosic than are its parts in the two earlier sonatas, and while the music isn’t pitch black in all four of its movements—the second movement Adagio offers an oasis of calm from the more tempestuous moments in the first movement and finale, the third movement—a sort of slow-moving scherzo—is furtive and emotionally ambiguous.
Brahms began work on this final violin sonata in 1886, the same year that produced the sun-kissed A-Major Sonata, but the D-Minor Sonata wasn’t completed until 1888. Within that timeframe, he composed a boatload of songs but very few major orchestral or chamber works. He did, however, take a renewed interest in the cello, giving us the Cello Sonata in F Major, op. 99, and the one largescale orchestral work of this period, the Double Concerto in A Minor, op. 102, one of his most enigmatic and perplexing scores. Austrian musicologist Richard Specht described it as “one of Brahms’s most inapproachable and joyless compositions,” and Brahms himself, amused and amazed that he had written it, referred to the piece as his “folly.”
In a way, however, the Double Concerto brings us full circle back to Brahms’s Scherzo from the “F-A-E” Sonata, “for the Concerto makes use of the musical motif A–E–F, a permutation of the F–A–E motto.” [Michael Musgrave, Brahms’s First Symphony: Thematic Coherence and Its Secret Origin].
As I was listening to Rachel Kolly and Christian Chamorel playing Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1, a most uncanny meeting of music and climatological convergence took place. I happened to gaze out my window onto a windswept scene of fluffy snowflakes turning the landscape white. It was uncanny because snow is a newsworthy rarity in these parts where I live, and the gently falling late winter flakes struck me as Nature’s own counterpoint to the mood of this music.
To my illustrious list of most favored versions of Brahms’s violin sonatas cited earlier in the review, another name now needs to be added: Rachel Kolly. The tone she draws from her 1732 “ex-Hamma” Strad, and the manner in which she finds the essence of the emotional affect in every gesture and phrase. Take, for example, bar 36 in the first movement of the G-Major Sonata. Here, the violin materializes out of the piano part with the movement’s second theme in a passage marked con anima, Dutifully, Kolly moves the melody forward, but at the same time, she gives voice to its expansive, cresting feeling.
Her tempo for the last movement is a bit faster than is customary, but in her articulation—listen to the way in which she makes us aware of the almost imperceptible 16th-note rests, like a catching of the breath, that Brahms inserts between the eighth-note and 16th-note rhythmic pattern—and the way n which her phrases join seamlessly with the Chamorel’s piano. The mental imagery of falling raindrops in this, Brahms’s “Rain” Sonata is unmistakable.
In the A-Major Sonata (No. 2), the rain gives way to a sunnier and warmer clime, as Brahms summered in Switzerland. Is it serendipity that Kolly, who hails from Lausanne, has such an innate feeling for this music? One can’t say for sure, but what one can say for sure is that the music is not just in her fingertips, it seems to come from an instinctive place deep in her being.
The last of the three sonatas is of a very different character than its siblings. For one thing, it’s in four movements instead of three, and for another thing, it’s in a minor key, specifically D Minor, which, according to the affective characteristics of musical keys, is restive and even splenetic—consider the first movement of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, composed early on in his career.
Brahms dedicated the sonata to his friend, the eminent conductor Hans von Bülow, and it was premiered in Budapest in 1888 by violinist Jenő Hubay with Brahms at the piano. While the violin parts of the first two sonatas, on a technical level, are reasonably manageable, with practice, by advanced students and talented amateurs, the D-Minor Sonata is definitely for the pros. While it clearly demands virtuosity, I would hesitate for call it a virtuoso work in the way that term is commonly understood. It’s not written to show off the player’s technique or dazzle the audience with runs, roulades, and acrobatics. It’s just plain hard due to the awkwardness of certain passages on the fingerboard, the tricky rhythms (always a Brahms minefield), and the unrelenting struggle the violin has against the piano. In the case of this sonata, the piano is perhaps less of a companionable partner than it is an antagonist.
While all players manage to greater or lesser degree to bring out the bile in the work’s finale, Kolly and Chamorel are positively feral and savage in their reading of it. This is hair-on-fire, jump-out-of-your-skin playing.
I wondered at first why they would place the early “F-A-E” Scherzo movement at the end of the program, after the finale of the Third Sonata, instead of at the beginning, where it belongs chronologically. The answer became patently obvious in their approach to the Scherzo. Though it’s in C Minor rather than D Minor, the Scherzo is cut from exactly the same cloth as the D-Minor Sonata’s finale. You could almost substitute one for the other. And the ferocious fury the players unleash in the Scherzo is like none other I’ve heard.
Rachel Kolly has soloed with leading orchestras throughout Europe and in Japan. Her recording of violin sonatas by Strauss and Lekeu (reviewed in Fanfare 42:1 by Robert Maxham and Robert Markow) won a Supersonic Award. Numerous accolades and awards have followed. Kolly has also been recognized for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of Handicap International and of promoting charitable endeavors, such as various aid programs for underprivileged children in Cambodia living on the street or suffering from AIDS, and a water awareness program in which she taught children to play on instruments recycled from discarded items.
Christian Chamorel, with whom Kolly regularly performs, is likewise of Swiss nationality, He trained at conservatories in Lausanne, Zürich, and Munich, and received a prize from Geneva’s Societé des Arts. Since 2007, he has taught at the Genève Conservatory.
As stated earlier, Kolly and Chamorel’s recording of Brahms’s violin sonatas and Scherzo now tops my list of top-rated versions of these works.
BBC MAG
Distinction SUPERSONIC of the magazine Pizzicato : " Both composers, Guillaume Lekeu and Richard Strauss, were twenty-two years old when they wrote their unique violin sonatas. Strauss wrote his six years before Lekeu, and later he remained faithful to orchestral music. Lekeu had no chance to write another sonata, as he died of typhus at the age of 24.
Despite their early creation, both works already have an expressive and individual touch that is directed towards the artistic future. While the tonal language of Strauss remains relatively traditional, but contains improvising elements, Lekeu's composition has numerous chromatic elements and surprising twists. The slow movements are intimate and intense. Both sonatas are technically and musically very challenging for musicians. The two additional works arranged by the two performing artists, a melody by Lekeu and a song by Strauss, both of which were created at the same time as the sonatas, are also fine compositions. The German idiom is opposed to the Belgian-French idiom. This means that two differing views of the world are side by side, which still fit together perfectly. Both artists have been playing together for a long time and therefore have a deep understanding of each other's musical thoughts. This leads to an intensive and seamless dialogue without any compulsion. On the other hand, they also bring in different ideas, as in this recording. While the desire for Lekeu came from the violinist Rachel Kolly d' Alba, the pianist Christian Chamorel brought Strauss into play. Together they have created extraordinary interpretations of the two sonatas. The technical requirements are simply transferred with their class, although these should not be underestimated. Strauss' expressiveness is still a little more moderate, probably due to the composer's lack of development into large-format and opulent orchestral works.
"I doubt I will ever encounter another performance of Elgar’s Piano Quintet that so absolutely captured the ardour and beauty of this gorgeous score, those moments of nostalgia in the outer movements having the aristocratic uprightness of the Edwardian England that Elgar pictured. The central Adagio’s wistful peace reflects the countryside, the warmth of the quartet of strings, lead by the Swiss violinist, Rachel Kolly d’Alba, creating a spontaneity that could only come from musicians who deeply loved the music they were performing. Adam Johnson was a tower of strength in a demanding role for the piano, though it was nothing compared to Faure’s Second Piano Quartet where page after page was black with notes. It is said to be a score that is loathed to reveal its inner secrets, but that was certainly not the case here, the passion of this intrinsically French score emerging with poetry and stature in playing that was immaculate. Above all it was the acoustic of the Priory chapel that helped them to achieve such sensitivity and elegance, the song of the Blackbird, as portrayed by the flute of Dan Watts in Messiaen’s Le Merle noir, resonating around this visually delightful space." DAVID DENTON for Yorkshire Post, St Hilda’s Priory, Sneaton Castle
“Her electrifying intensity and deep involvement with the emotional narrative of each piece makes an indelible impact and feels like a throwback to a golden age when making music felt like an act of celebration. (…) d’Alba’s hypnotic performance is a triumph of interpretative incandescence as she weaves in and out of the music’s surging textures.” Julian Haylock reviewing “French Impressions” in "Strad Magazine"
" The best Swiss soloist in one century! With Rachel, we can finally hope swiss artists will play a major role on international stages. It has been quite calm, recently..." K. Luhers-Kaiser - Sonntagzeitung
BS Artist Management