FRIDAY 16 | In 1886, French composer César Franck composed his famous Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, considered one of the finest ever written. “Franck is a bit of an anomaly in the history of music,” says Anton Isselhardt, director of the Art Plus Foundation, who has summoned two Norwegian musicians for this evening’s recital. Biographer Léon Vallas puts it like this: “The overpowering climaxes to which he builds are never a frenzy of emotion; they are superbly calm and exalted. The structure of his music is strangely inorganic. His material does not develop. He adds phrase upon phrase, detail upon detail, with astonishing power to knit and weave closely what comes with what went before. It is this strange absence of genuinely dramatic and sensuous elements from Franck’s music which gives it its quite peculiar stamp, the quality which appeals to us as a sort of poetry of religion. It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted. It does not reflect the life of the body, nor that of the sovereign mind, but the life of the spirit.”
WHO: Hartini Van Rijssel (violin) and Mark Lippe (piano)
WHAT: César Franck’s Sonata in A Major and Franz Schubert’s Sonatinas
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm August 16
WHY: “It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted” – Léon Vallas