The musical relationship between violinist Renaud Capuçon and pianist Frank Braley is defined by the 10 Beethoven violin sonatas. They have been playing them together for 16 years and five years ago they committed all 10 to disc. The stall selling that CD set in the foyer was doing a brisk trade during the interval of this, the last of three concerts in four days presenting the sonatas as a cycle.
Familiarity has not bred complacency, and there was no sign of routine: each movement was alive, and a couple were excitingly risky. The first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata became startlingly urgent and stormy, and the duo’s racing tempo meant the odd note of Braley’s went missing. The result? One of the most thrilling performances of the movement imaginable.
Capuçon’s violin sounds so bright, so robustly beautiful of tone, that he can seem the default dominant player, but it is Braley who tends to control the emotional temperature, coming forward when the mood of the music darkens. The first sonata on the programme, Op 30, No 3 in G, began with both players sounding almost carefree, but in the slow movement Braley seemed by the end to have tamed the violin, before Capuçon again took the lead in a stomping finale.
The order was strictly chronological, so we ended not with the climactic Kreutzer, but with the deceptively genial Op 96 Sonata in G, written a decade later by a composer now coming to terms with his deafness. The long first movement unfolded dreamily, in playing of almost relaxed poise; but throughout the sonata, Capuçon and especially Braley gave us glimpses of the disquiet beneath the music’s surface. Will they play it the same way next time? Probably not, but the sense that their interpretations are not set in stone is what makes this duo so worth hearing.
