Jenna Sherry & Dániel Lőwenberg - Sonatas For Violin And Piano (CD)

Release Date: 11/06/20

These intimate and nostalgic sonatas bid farewell to the rich musical legacy of late Romanticism

American violinist Jenna Sherry and Hungarian pianist Dániel Lőwenberg perform Johannes Brahms's two late sonatas (op. 120) and Ernő Dohnányi's violin-piano sonata (op. 21) on the latest classical release on BMC Records. Brahms's late style was the musical mother tongue of the young Dohnányi, creating a continuity that comes into focus while listening to the album. In their own different ways, these intimate and nostalgic sonatas all bid farewell to the rich musical legacy of late Romanticism at the turn of the 20th century in ''blissful peacetime''

Passing, saying goodbye, mourning, retrospection. These feelings characterize the sonatas of Brahms and Dohnányi, interpreted by Jenna Sherry and Dániel Lőwenberg on this album. In the case of Johannes Brahms, the immersion in the past and valediction is also accounted for by biographical facts: the aging composer was about to retire when he heard Richard Mühlfeld's clarinet playing, which electrified him so much that he immediately wrote several compositions for Mühlfeld - including two clarinet-piano sonatas (op. 120) which are also featured in this album. Brahms later published the Sonata in F minor (op. 120, no. 1) and the Sonata in E flat major (op. 120, no. 2) in viola and then violin versions, but violinists rarely play these works. With this recording, the two artists prove that the poetic beauty of these pieces also prevails in the timbre of the violin. In addition to the two Brahms sonatas, Ernő Dohnányi's Sonata for Violin and Piano (op. 21) also appears on the record. Although Dohnányi is known as a Brahms follower, in this piece the Hungarian composer has already embarked on his own journey with his innovation in the sonata form. The piece ends with a triple pianissimo, which gives us the opportunity to pause for a moment in the cyclically rotating time and immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the ''blissful peacetime''.