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Theme varie: Works for Violin and Piano

The Europadisc Review

Theme varie: Works for Violin and Piano

Elena Urioste (violin), Tom Poster (piano)

£13.75

Violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster have built their partnership around programmes that feel curated rather than merely assembled, and Thème varié may be their most persuasive act of musical cartography yet. Its territory is French and Belgian music written between 1892 and 1932, and its invisible presiding figure is César Franck, whose influence passes through Guillaume Lekeu, Mel Bonis and Charlotte Sohy without requiring the inevitable inclusion of his own Sonata. The result is not an anthology of rediscoveries so much as a beauti... read more

Violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster have built their partnership around programmes that feel curated rather than merely assembled, and Thème varié may be their most persuasive act of musica... read more

Theme varie: Works for Violin and Piano

Theme varie: Works for Violin and Piano

Elena Urioste (violin), Tom Poster (piano)

Violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster have built their partnership around programmes that feel curated rather than merely assembled, and Thème varié may be their most persuasive act of musical cartography yet. Its territory is French and Belgian music written between 1892 and 1932, and its invisible presiding figure is César Franck, whose influence passes through Guillaume Lekeu, Mel Bonis and Charlotte Sohy without requiring the inevitable inclusion of his own Sonata. The result is not an anthology of rediscoveries so much as a beautifully argued sequence, one in which kinship is revealed through colour, rhetoric and the long memory of the cyclic tradition.

Sohy’s titular Thème varié, op15 (1921), makes an arresting opening. Urioste gives the sombre theme a dark yet richly sonorous, centred tone, while Poster resists turning the piano’s harmonies into generalised late-Romantic upholstery. As the variations gather urgency, the players retain a firm sense of architectural direction: climaxes arrive as consequences, not effects. That same refusal of overstatement benefits the first two Bonis miniatures. The Andante religioso (1910) glows without becoming devotional kitsch, and the Allegretto non troppo (1904/10) moves with an elegant, conversational lift. Poster’s playing is especially telling here, attentive to inner voices yet never fussy, while Urioste phrases with an instinctive singer-like awareness of where a line must lean and where it should simply float.

The centrepiece of the disc is Lekeu’s 1892 G major Sonata, a work whose emotional temperature can sometimes encourage performers to confuse intensity with saturation. Urioste and Poster do not underplay its fervour, but they pace it patiently. The opening movement, marked Très modéré, unfolds in broad paragraphs. At times quietly radiant, its surges of feeling are supported by a strong underlying pulse. Urioste’s sound has warmth and grain, though her most memorable contribution is the flexibility with which she shades repeated material; Poster, meanwhile, makes the piano’s dense textures speak with unusual transparency. In the Très lent second movement, the duo find stillness without inertia, and the finale’s agitation is controlled by an acute sense of return and transformation. The performance ultimately suggests that Lekeu’s precocity lay not merely in his harmonic language but in his command of emotional recurrence.

Two Élégies by Saint-Saëns follow, and their placement is shrewd. After Lekeu’s expansiveness, they seem almost Classical in outline, yet Urioste discovers a discreet theatricality in their restraint. The D major Élégie, op.143 (1915), is shaped with noble simplicity, while the F major, op.160 (1920), carries a more private, unsettled grief. Bonis’s Largo, op.83 (1910), then acts as a hinge: brief, grave and harmonically searching, it prepares the ear for Messiaen without pretending that the stylistic distance between them is small.

Messiaen’s Thème et variations (1932) is the programme’s great change of light, a wedding gift for his bride, Claire (Louise) Delbos. Poster clarifies each harmonic shift without hardening the piano tone, and Urioste allows the music’s ecstasy to grow from concentration rather than display. The early variations are sharply characterised, but the cumulative design is paramount. By the final Très modéré, the violin line seems less accompanied than illuminated, its tone intense and glassy, its rapture sustained by control of bow speed and vibrato. It is a performance that understands Messiaen’s sensuality as inseparable from discipline.

The tiny Nocturne of 1928 by Elsa Barraine (a classmate and lifelong friend of Messiaen), presented here as a first recording, is an inspired coda. Its brevity leaves a disproportionate afterimage: shadowy, suspended and emotionally unresolved. Urioste and Poster do not inflate it into a manifesto; they let its strangeness remain intact.

Recorded at Potton Hall in Suffolk, the familiar Chandos spaciousness is used here less to confer grandeur than to preserve the physical character of the partnership. The violin is present but not spotlit, the piano full-bodied without becoming orchestral, and the bloom around sustained notes helps bind the programme’s contrasting idioms. Just as important is the handling of silence. Cadences are given time to settle, though never so much that the recital loses continuity.

The ordering, too, has the logic of a thoughtfully planned concert: Sohy establishes the principle of variation; Bonis offers intimate perspectives; Lekeu expands the emotional horizon, Saint-Saëns and Bonis gather the fragments after the storm, Messiaen turns variation into revelation, and Barraine closes the door quietly. Even the generous 72-minute span feels concentrated, because each miniature has a structural function rather than serving as decorative relief within the larger design. Generous, detailed booklet notes by Nigel Simeone and the performers themselves enhance further enhance the album’s attractiveness.

One of the chief reasons why Thème varié succeeds is because advocacy never overwhelms artistry. These musicians clearly believe in the repertoire, but belief is expressed through proportion, tonal imagination and the give-and-take of genuine duo playing. The album’s neglected names are not displayed as worthy exhibits; they are allowed to converse, argue and echo one another across four decades. Chandos’s programme thus feels at once exploratory and inevitable: a recital whose discoveries deepen with every return.

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