CHAMBER MUSIC FOR STRINGS

For a long time the fame of Eugène Ysaÿe as a composer was overshadowed by his fame as a performing musician.

Ysaÿe was the most renowned violin virtuoso of his generation. Already in the 1890s, when he was a young man in his thirties, he was pivotal in advocating contemporary French and Belgian music. César Franck gave him his Violin Sonata (1886) as a wedding gift; Claude Debussy wrote his String Quartet (1893) for the Ysaÿe Quartet and the wellknown Poème (1897) by Ernest Chausson is dedicated to Eugène Ysaÿe. Chausson modelled this Poème on an early composition by Ysaÿe himself: the Poème Elégiaque for violin and orchestra from 1895, which Ysaÿe had dedicated to Gabriel Fauré. It was quite common for a musician such as Eugène Ysaÿe to compose as well. A ‘berceuse’, ‘valse’ or rêve d’enfant’ by the musician himself always went down well at recitals of a great violin virtuoso. However, Ysaÿe did not only compose salon pieces; he also wrote violin concertos, symphonic poems and chamber music. And later, in 1923, he wrote his legendary Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, a musical heritage for the generations to come: they are the violinists’ equivalent to the Six Cello Suites by Bach. Ysaÿe’s work is not always easy to track down. Many compositions only exist in manuscript or they were not published until years later, sometimes in adapted versions. His son Antoine Ysaÿe and later his grandson Jacques Ysaÿe took care of the musical heritage and publications. Today the collection is located in the Royal Library of Brussels. This CD presents some premieres from this collection.