Sonates

Description

Two of the three works featured on this recording were originally composed for violin and are performed here in a version with flute. César Franck's Flute Sonata (Violin) in A major owes much to Fauré's, with which it shares the same key. It also shows several affinities with Beethoven's music. The fourth movement, a rondo alternating between refrain and verses, begins with a canon whose elegance impressed the writer Marcel Proust to such an extent that he took it as a model for the sonata of his fictional composer, Monsieur Vinteuil. The first masterpiece of Gabriel Fauré, who until then had composed exclusively for voice, except for a few pages for piano, the first Flute (Violin) and Piano Sonata in A major Op. 13 was conceived during the summer of 1875 while staying in Normandy. The Finale, Allegro quasi presto, is passionate, warm, even Brahmsian, and, like the second movement, seems to foreshadow Franck's Sonata. Although Sergei Prokofiev's Flute and Piano Sonata in D major Op. 94 has nothing to do with those of Fauré and Franck, it does have a connection to France, as it is said to have been inspired by the playing of the great French flutist Georges Barrère, who was based in New York and whom Prokofiev heard during his last tour in the United States in 1938.