The Heifetz Collection, Volume 44 - Ravel, Debussy, Pespighi, Martinů

Jascha Heifetz had a strong and productive interest in the music of his own time. Many substantial works were composed especially for him, of course, and he championed dozens of others that many of his colleagues tended to overlook; those recorded here were composed early in the 20th century, at the very time he was beginning his career. Both of the sonatas on this disc were written in 1916-17. Debussy, who composed no sonatas before 1914, was moved by the outbreak of World War I to sign himself "musicien français" and to plan a series of six sonatas for varied instrumentation as a sort of patriotic gesture, with a nod to the legacy of Rameau and Couperin. He lived to complete only three of the projected sonatas, however— one for cello and piano, one for flute, viola and harp, and one for violin and piano. The violin sonata was the last work he completed in any form, and its premiere— with the violinist Gaston Poulet at the Salle Gaveau on May 5,1917—marked his last public appearance as a pianist. Léon Vallas, in his book on Debussy, wrote that this work, with its "tendency to utilize folk songs, free cantilenas, and even oriental melodies," has "an impotent vehemence about it. It suggests a fight for life, a struggle against death, particularly noticeable in the repetition of yearning melodies ... The composition ends like a ballet, in a bounding, whirling vortex." The violinist with whom Debussy originally expected to perform his sonata, not only in Paris, but also on an American tour, was Arthur Hartmann, an American friend who lived in Paris. Hartmann transcribed La fille aux cheveux de lin and other Debussy piano pieces, before 1910, and he and Debussy played them together frequently. Heifetz made four recordings of this piece, with three different pianists; the one preserved here is his third—and his second with his longtime regular accompanist, Emanuel Bay. The violin sonata Respighi produced was also his only one, but it was by no means a valediction: it came near the beginning of his richest period, just after he started his great cycle of symphonic poems with The Fountains of Rome and just before the first of his three orchestral suites of Ancient Airs and Dances. The robust, expressive sonata, which balances so successfully emotional power with musical substance, was one of the many worthwhile works Heifetz rescued from general neglect; for years he was the only major violinist to give it a place in his active repertory, and his recording of it remains one of the very few the work has received to date. Heifetz was also one of a small number of violinists to take notice of Leon Roques's imaginative transcription of the Menuet Ravel composed as the middle movement of his Sonatine for piano solo. He never recorded Ravel's violin sonata, but he did record some other transcriptions (his own among them) and the Tzigane (twice with piano, once with orchestra) as well as the Trio in A Minor reissued here. Ravel made some sketches for a piano concerto on Basque themes just before he composed his piano trio in 1914, and he felt he had put a "Basque flavor" in the trio's opening theme. His friend and biographer Roland-Manuel, however, who found the work as a whole "at once severe and impassioned," contended that when Ravel "thinks he is expressing himself in the Basque idiom, then pure Cas-tillian appears. " "Pantoum, " the title of the second movement, is the name of an ancient Malayan verse form long since adapted in French poetry, and is used here to label a scherzo based on the principles of that form and on themes from the preceding movement. The "Passacaille, " utterly different from the passacaglia in the Respighi sonata, echoes the era of the great clavecinists, as Ravel was to do again in Le tombeau de Couperin, while the brief Finale is a gaily energetic reprise of themes from earlier sections. This trio was one of only three works Heifetz recorded with Piatigorsky and Rubinstein on early monophonie LPs, following performances at the Ravinia Festival that brought them the sobriquet "The Million-Dollar Trio. " The Martinu Duo, a somewhat later work than the others on this disc—it was composed in 1927—was also recorded a bit later; it was a souvenir of the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts of 1964. —Richard Freed