Rainer Maria Klaas - Czerny: Violin Sonatas (2019)

Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our time, has energized music culture with significant impulses as a violinist and pianist who combines interpretive and scholarly work. For cpo he has now recorded two violin sonatas by Carl Czerny. After producing several violin and piano sonatas Czerny wrote his grand Sonata Concertante in four movements in 1848, the year of the failed revolution. The contrast to his first Violin Sonata of 1807, a work of his youth, could hardly be greater: reconsideration of Mozartian rhetoric and compositional technique mark this work pulsing with astonishing kinetic energy and with a concertante character for the most part embodied by the piano, while the violin part instead is assigned more the role of brilliant commentary or pointed interaction. Kolja Lessing himself wrote the booklet text and expresses the greatest thanks to Anton Kuerti not only for his tireless research, investigation, and revival of Czernys colossal oeuvre but also just as much for his meticulous transcription of what in part are Czernys difficult-to-decipher manuscripts into modern notation. Accordingly, Anton Kuerti, as Czernys real rediscoverer, shall have the last word with a deeply felt statement about these treasures that have now been unearthed: It is a rare privilege to find music that has been so inexcusably neglected and now brought back to life.