Dohnanyi/Janacek: Violin Sonatas

'[Dohnányi] The strongly Brahmsian Sonata is given a warm and affectionate reading, the central variation movement imaginatively characterised with Shaham's honeted tone proving an ideal foil for Arnon Erez's bold and dynamic piano playing. But it's the more folksy Ruralia hungarica that draws the most compelling performance, Shaham negotiating the challenging violin pyrotechnics of the outer movements with impressive powerhouse playing as well as delivering a wonderfully atmospheric Andante rubato alla Zingaresca' (BBC Music Magazine)

The Moravian Leoš Janácek and the Hungarian Erno Dohnányi are two of the seminal figures in the development of Eastern European music during the early twentieth century. Yet it was Janácek, the older man by a whole generation, who was in many respects the more forward-looking, original composer. Dohnányi represented rather an organic development of nineteenth-century stylistic trends, and he has often been seen as less important for his own works than as a forerunner and enabler for the more original achievements of his younger contemporaries Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, who drew more radical inspiration from Hungarian folk music. He was born in 1877 a mere thirty-five miles from Vienna, in the ancient Hungarian capital of Poszóny, then known as the Austro-Hungarian city of Pressburg (and now in Slovakia, where it is called Bratislava). He grew up in the shadow of Austro-German musical culture, typified by Brahms, and for a significant part of his career was known internationally by the German form of his name, Ernst von Dohnanyi. But he was equally conscious of the nationalist Hungarian traditions that had been cultivated by Liszt. In fact, no Hungarian musician since Liszt had been so versatile.