Bella Hirstova and Michael Houstoun Photo: Supplied
BEETHOVEN: Violin Sonata No 9 in A, Kreutzer
'We met in 2008 on the winner's tour of the Michael Hill International Violin Competition ... just from the very first rehearsals we bonded and I just felt this musical understanding, it's kind of unspoken. It's wonderful to play with him.' (Bella Hristova)
'Simply the most devastating concert piece among the ten violin sonatas that Beethoven wrote.' (Michael Houstoun)
'This concert was one of my highlights of the year.' (Producer, Tim Dodd)
The Kreutzer Sonata allows the players to let fly with their skill and passion like no previous sonata for violin and piano.
Everything about the 1803 première of this sonata was frantic and unusual. The piece was first heard at an 8am performance which must have got the day off to a flying start for listeners. Beethoven was at the keyboard and playing violin was the magnificently named George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower – a virtuoso of West Indian and European descent who'd been a child prodigy marketed in England as 'son of the African Prince'.
The two had been brought together by Beethoven's patron Count Lichnowsky. They hit it off and planned a concert. Beethoven already had the final movement which he'd bumped from an earlier sonata and two others were mapped out. They were only completed, and that in sketch form, shortly before the première, meaning Bridgetower read the second movement over the composer's shoulder and both men filled in the blank spots as they went.
One tale tells that after Beethoven whipped off a scale, Bridgetower mimicked it on a whim, inspiring the composer to leap to his feet and embrace his companion before resuming.
Bridgetower recalled: 'Beethoven’s expression in the Andante was so chaste, which always characterised the performance of all his slow movements, that it was unanimously hailed to be repeated twice.'
The work was originally to be known at the 'Bridgetower' Sonata, but according to the violinist, the two fell out over a woman and Bridgetower was scrapped from the title. When it was published in 1805, it was to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer that the work was dedicated.
This may have been with an eye to further connections in Paris, but Kreutzer never played the sonata in public and according to Berlioz, labelled Beethoven's music 'outrageously unintelligible'.
But the critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote: 'One has to have limited one’s love of art to just a certain realm of the more ordinary, or be strongly prejudiced against Beethoven if one does not recognise in this piece of music … a new demonstration of the artist’s great genius, his vivid, often glowing fantasy, and his broad knowledge of deeper harmonic art.’
Recorded on 9 September 2017 in Auckland Town Hall by RNZ Concert
Producer: Tim Dodd
Engineer: Adrian Hollay
Kreutzer Sonata by René François Xavier Prinet Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Kreutzer Sonata has had many spin-offs.
Leo Tolstoy's novella of the same name was published in 1889 and in turn gave rise to Leoš Janáček's First String Quartet.
The novella has been adapted for film at least a dozen times and it inspired the 1901 painting Kreutzer Sonata by René François Xavier Prinet. The painting was used for years in Tabu perfume ads.
There have also been plays, ballets, and a multi-media theatre work created in New Zealand in 2007.
Related audio:
More Beethoven sonatas from Bella Hristova and Michael Houstoun
