Carolin Widmann / Alexander Lonquich FRANZ SCHUBERT Fantasie C-Dur - Rondo h-Moll - Sonate A-Dur

This insightful recording of Franz Schubert’s music is also a first documentation of the musical alliance between violinist Carolin Widmann and pianist Alexander Lonquich, which has been gathering momentum over the last four years. They first came together to play Messiaen in Salzburg in 2008. The following year a Lonquich solo recital in Rome convinced Widmann that they should collaborate on Schubert’s music for violin and piano.

In this album, recorded at Historic concert hall Reitstadl Neumarkt, the duo plays the C-Major Fantasy of 1827 and the Violin Sonata in A-Major of 1817, as well as the B-minor Rondo of 1826. If the influence of Beethoven is still marked in the 1817 sonata, the 1826 and 1827 pieces remain striking in their originality. Written at the request of Viennese virtuosi Josef Slawik and Karl Maria von Bocklet, they are pieces that transcend ‘mere’ virtuosity.

Lonquich describes them as “paradoxical”, compositions conceived as technical which nonetheless feel “thoroughly metaphysical”: “Schubert is music’s great Wanderer. He goes through highs and lows and subtle harmonic progressions. He’s invariably spoken of as the great writer of melodies, yet there is always extraordinary harmonic tension at work as well.”

Carolin Widmann: “There is ambivalence in Schubert: pain and beauty expressed with the same intensity. I can hear the Austrian countryside in his music when I’m playing and at the same time this feeling of reaching for the heavens. Great art is made out of this combination of rootedness and transcendence…”

Widmann and Lonquich’s empathetic reading casts aside conventions of violin and accompaniment, responding instead to the changing needs of Schubert’s music.

Carolin Widmann, who received praise and awards both for her accounts of Schumann’s violin sonatas and for the recital disc “Phantasy of Spring” (with music of Feldman, Zimmermann, Schoenberg and Xenakis) now applies her acute interpretive sensibilities to Franz Schubert. Widmann and Alexander Lonquich (whose own New Series disc with music of Schumann and Holliger was also a critical success) play the C-Major Fantasy of 1827 and the Violin Sonata in A-Major of 1817, as well as the B-minor Rondo of 1826 (the only one of these works published in Schubert’s lifetime). This is duo playing at a very high level, as Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich emphasizes in the liner notes: “Not once does Carolin Widmann and Alexander Lonquich’s intelligent and empathetic reading devolve into the trivial state of music for a domineering violin with piano accompaniment. Instead we are treated to a magically iridescent poem of changing colours, melodies and counterpoints.”