Joshua Bell Discusses French Chamber Works
Ask Joshua Bell about Franck’s violin sonata in a major—recorded on his new CD of French chamber works—and the superstar violinist declares: ‘I own it!’
Violinist Joshua Bell
Violinist Joshua Bell celebrated Thanksgiving 2010 in New York with family. The following day, he started recording tracks for his latest CD. “If it sounds like I’m kind of full . . . ,” the violinist jokes during a phone interview. “The tryptophan in turkey that makes you kind of logy—I hope you can’t detect it in the recording.”
Bell needn’t worry. Recording the sonatas of the French composers Ravel, Franck, and Saint-Saëns, Bell played with all the intensity and energy typical of his live performances and past CDs alike, say people who attended the sessions. “He was working up a sweat,” says Steven Epstein, the recording’s producer.
French Impressions, to be released January 10 by Sony Masterworks, is the first sonata recording in 15 years from Bell, whose recent discs have featured mostly Baroque music, film scores, show tunes, crossover arrangements, and works by living composers. In French Impressions, Bell, with pianist Jeremy Denk, loops back to traditional chamber repertoire, recording three big sonatas suited to solo recitals at Wigmore or Carnegie. “Because I’ve done so many other kinds of recordings, it certainly was meaningful to me to finally do these,” the violinist says.
The sonata recording comes to fruition following performances of all three works on Bell’s numerous recital tours with Denk since 2004. “We really wanted to document something of our collaboration that we’ve had for many years,” says the 44-year-old Bell, who describes Denk as “very thoughtful, very intellectual. It comes out in his playing.” Denk “is the kind of musician I like to surround myself with.”
Although the world is awash in recordings of Franck’s Violin Sonata in A major (Bell himself recorded it in 1989 with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet for the Decca label), the violinist says that after years of performing the work onstage, he was ready to record it again.
The four-movement piece is characterized by the delicate, lyrical quality of the opening Allegretto moderato and the equally pastoral “Ben moderato recitative fantasia” of the third movement. The piece carries a larger sentimental value for Bell, who initially learned it a young teen soon after he began studying with Josef Gingold in Bloomington, Indiana.
“Every note of that piece brings back a special memory of my teacher,” Bell says. “It’s a piece that people continue to love, and there’s so much room for individual expression in it. It’s one of those pieces that everyone thinks is their own. Everyone owns that piece and makes it something very different.
“I feel I own it.”
Plenty of listeners disparage the Franck and the high drama packed into its four movements as corny, a notion that, Bell says, “drives me up the wall.” The key to interpreting and performing the work, he says, is managing the sonata’s many “goose-bump moments” and “figuring out the phrasing to the harmonies that you think are most meaningful, because you can overdo it and then lose sense of the line and the bigger picture.”
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