The two instruments may be cornerstones of orchestral and chamber music, and both have such significant solo repertories of their own, but the music composed for violin and cello together remains inexplicably scanty.
Composers shy away from such an exposed medium, which gives them neither the option of writing a bravura showpiece for a solo instrument, or of taking refuge in the more complex textures that adding extra instruments would provide. Some are facing up to the challenge – both Jörg Widmann and Mark-Anthony Turnage have recently written duos, for instance – but when putting together programmes for a recital or a disc, the starting point remains the two 20th-century masterpieces for violin and cello, Zoltán Kodály’s Duo and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata.
That pair of works are the mainstay of Julia Fischer and Daniel Müller-Schott’s disc together, too. But they play them with such energy, engagement and virtuoso precision that there’s never any hint of overfamiliarity; in both works, every detail of the extremely demanding string writing is carefully etched, and captured with tingling immediacy in the recording, whether it’s the rhapsodic lines of the Kodály, or the acerbic bitonal clashes of the Ravel.
And between the two, they include another substantial piece, composed just after Ravel’s Sonata. The Duo for Violin and Cello, by Erwin Schulhoff, shows all the standard tendencies of 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit – there are borrowings from jazz and folk music, and some passages of earnest Hindemith-style counterpoint, combined with a few self-conscious harmonic excursions – but Fischer and Müller-Schott take such care over the music and invest it with such purpose, that it can more than hold its own between the Kodály and the Ravel.
The pair have been working together since they were teenagers, and they end their disc with a piece that they regularly play as an encore after performances of Brahms’s Double Concerto. It’s an arrangement for violin and cello by Johan Halvorsen of a Handel Passacaglia, and like everything else in this brilliantly executed collection, it’s exactly the right piece in the right place.
