Brahms • C Schumann

Brahms: Violin Sonatas Nos 1-3;

C Schumann: Andante molto

Alina Ibragimova (violin),

Cedric Tiberghien (piano)

Hyperion CDA68200 71:06 mins

With their richly inventive play of intimacy and lyricism, warmth and melancholy, Brahms’s three violin sonatas deserve their standing as the most performed and recorded after the Beethoven canon. But they are not without their problems. Brahms loved full piano textures and the typical timbre of concert grands has become thicker and weightier than the instruments of his own time. However early performers such as Joachim may have tackled the violin parts, it had become customary by the mid-20th century for violinists to resort to a heavily bowed, vibrantly resonant tone to hold their own against Brahms’s piano writing – as instanced in the classic recordings of Josef Suk with Julius Katchen.

Alina Ibragimova is perfectly capable of a forceful gutsiness as she demonstrates here in some of Brahms’s more agitated development sections. But she is also a period-sensitive performer, and in seeking to realise Brahms’s frequent markings of dolce and mezza voce she often fines down her sound to an almost vibrato-less whisper.

Tiberghien plays with all his usual sensitivity, but can only fine down his tone so far, and Andrew Keener is too responsible a recording producer to fake balances. For some ears, the intermittent disparity may alloy what, in all other respects, are distinguished readings: alive to the easeful flow of Sonata No. 1, the distilled songfulness of No. 2, and, especially, the plaintive restlessness of No. 3 – in the final tarantella of which these players release their full force. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE ★★★★

RECORDING ★★★★