Concert programme — Tartini, Brahms, Paganini & Waxman

Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770)

Violin Sonata in G minor “The Devil’s Trill” (c1713)

Larghetto affettuoso

Allegro

Grave - allegro assai

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Violin Sonata No.3 in D minor Op.108 (1886-8)

Allegro

Adagio

Un poco presto e con sentimento

Presto agitato

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)

Cantabile in D major

Franz Waxman (1906-1967)

Carmen Fantasy (1947)

Violinists have long been associated - in the popular imagination or even in their own minds - with the devil. Tartini ‘s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata is said to have been inspired by a dream in which, having made a pact with him, the composer persuaded the devil to play his violin and heard music of “such perfection and meaning that I could never have imagined anything like it.” On waking, however, Tartini could remember little more it than a series of trills spectacularly sustained over a simultaneously bowed melodic line, which he duly incorporated in his Sonata in G minor. After an innocent siciliano-style first movement and a fiery Allegro, the devil’s trill is featured three times in the Allegro assai sections that alternate with the Grave material in the last movement. If, incidentally, you hear a disproportionately long and ultra-diabolical unaccompanined cadenza shortly before the end you are in all probability listening to a much-used elaboration by Fritz Kreisler.

Although he was an admirer of Paganini, another violinist with devilish associations, Brahms was not much interested in virtuosity for its own sake, and the older he was the less interested he became. Technical bravura would have been entirely out of place in the quietly regretful last of his violin sonatas. Apart from an interesting colour effect in the development section of the first movement, where the same note alternates between adjacent strings, expressive thirds applied to the melodic line in the Adagio, a briefly dramatic episode of multi-stopped chords in the middle of the third movement and a stressful crescendo high on the E string at the climax of the last, the violin writing is essentially modest. It is, however, as eloquent as it is effortless.

Paganini’s Cantabile is not the sort of thing that led an incredulous public to suspect that the violinist-composer must have made a pact with the devil. Scored originally for violin and guitar, it is not a virtuoso piece in the ordinary sense but an example of how effectively he could persuade a violin to sustain an appealingly shapely line - which is a less sensational but no less valuable kind of virtuosity.

For a characteristic example of violin virtuosity in the ordinary sense we need look no further than the Carmen Fantasy by the Hollywood composer Franz Waxman. It was written originally for a film called Humoresque but, after Heifetz had adopted it, Waxman’s colourful score became one of the most popular of the many concert arrangements of Bizet’s music. After a short burst of the toreadors’ march on the piano, the tunes include (in order of appearance) Carmen’s habanera, her unhappy “En vain pour éviter les réponses,” the aragonaise entracte, Carmen’s séguidille, and the gypsy dance “Les tringles des sistres” - all of them introduced and then extravagantly elaborated by the violin.