‘Its brilliance overwhelmed me with emotion’ - Philippe Quint on Franck’s Violin Sonata

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The great Bronislaw Huberman once called the Violin Sonata by César Franck ‘a metaphysical piece’. I’d go one further and say it’s other-worldly. To me it feels as if it was dictated to Franck by supernatural forces. I was 15 when I first heard it performed, by Mikhail Kopelman with his wife Anna Gurfinkel on piano. It hit me like a train – the sonata’s beauty and lyricism, its melodies and virtuosic brilliance all overwhelmed me with emotion.

I was studying in Moscow with Andrey Korsakov. The Soviet school at that time was very focused on building technique, and my repertoire was mostly made up of Paganini, Sarasate and Wieniawski. I thought that sonatas were generally slow and boring, and this was the first I’d ever heard that showed me the beauty they could have. I raced to Korsakov and told him I wanted to study the piece, and he said, ‘Of course – once we’ve mastered the fundamentals.’…