Much promise as a new survey starts out
The Strad Issue: September 2026
Description: Much promise as a new survey starts out
Musicians: Minna Pensola (violin) Vida Vujić (cello) Simone Sgarbanti (piano)
Works: Marx: Chamber Music vol.1: Suite in F major; Pastorale; Violin Sonata no.2 ‘Spring’
Catalogue number: NAXOS 8579181
Joseph Marx is perhaps best remembered nowadays for his songs, although many will have made his acquaintance via the Piano Concerto rescued from obscurity almost 30 years ago by Marc-André Hamelin and Hyperion in the groundbreaking Romantic Piano Concerto series. Nevertheless, there is a good handful of works for chamber forces, and Naxos embarks on a survey of them with this coupling of an early cello work and a late violin one.
After the rapturous virtuosity and ravishingly rich harmony of the Piano Concerto, the Suite for cello and piano (published in 1915) comes as a splash of cool, clear water. The slightly earlier Pastorale, with its somewhat riper harmonic palette, was to have been its first movement but was replaced by the present Präludium; then come an impassioned Largo, a rather stiff-backed Minuet and a closing Rondo, the work’s finest movement, contrasting a cello cantilena over rippling piano figures with a range of episodes.
The Second Violin Sonata was composed towards the end of the Second World War but represents an attempt to remember happier times, with quotes from earlier works. Impressionistic harmonies underpin a prevailing tone of nostalgia, most especially in the central Allegretto ‘im Serenadenton’. Finnish violinist Minna Pensola and Serbian cellist Vida Vujić are sensitive throughout to Marx’s personal if hardly innovative idiom, although they are balanced a little distantly against the dauntless Italian pianist Simone Sgarbanti.
DAVID THREASHER
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