Sonata da Camera Op.48 (1927)

Prelude

Sarabande

Finale

As a pupil of Massenet and Franck, a winner of just about every prize available to him as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, including the Prix de Rome, and a highly successful composer in his time, Pierné should surely occupy a more prominent place in the present-day concert repertoire. He is well represented on CD but, in this country at least, the average concert-goer is more likely to come across him as the far-sighted conductor of first performances of major work by Debussy, Ravel,    Roussel and Stravinsky than as a composer. Indeed, it could be that through his activities as a conductor – as director of the Concerts Colonne he was responsible for at least 48 concerts a season for more than 20 years – he absorbed so many diverse influence that his own creative personality was diluted in the process, making his music a less than compellingly obvious choice for concert programmes.

Anyway, a neo-baroque trio sonata is not the place for a display of personality. Written in 1927 in memory of the flautist Louis Fleury, who had died two years earlier, the Sonata da camera is a model of discretion. It is perfectly proportioned, exquisitely crafted, and unfailingly engaging in melodic interest – just the sort of thing that one would hope to hear after reading the lines quoted from Virgil’s Fifth Eclogue at the head of the score: “Since we have met here, Mopsus, adept both of us – you in the art of the rustic flute, I in the art of song – why do we not sit down together in the shade of these elms and hazels?” While neither the flute nor the cello is restricted to one kind of material, their respective Virgilian roles are clear from the exposition of the first movement: the flute begins with a lively country-dance main theme to a pizzicato accompaniment, the cello supplying a more lyrical second subject. The piano is deftly integrated with them in a mainly contrapuntal, often fugal texture contained within a modest sonata-form structure.

The memorial element of the work determines the nature of central Sarabande, which begins as a slow fugue on the elegiac melody introduced by muted cello. While the imitative relationship between the three instruments is sustained in one way or another to the end of the movement, fugal formality does not survive beyond the first entry of the flute, which leads into a comparatively free development. The flute also initiates a rather more animated episode before the return of the opening theme. Completing the ternary design of the work, the Finale broadly reflects the events of the Prelude, the dancing main theme again being the responsibility of the flute with pizzicato support and the lyrical contrast again that of the cello. This does not mean, however, that anything in Pierné’s mercurial imagination is predictable, as the ending confirms.