If the night eventually breaks, as the title of this fine chamber music album suggests, it won’t be before it has bewitched us. The Night Shall Break offers a programme as beautiful as it is superbly rendered by Hannah Hurwitz on violin, Colin Stokes on cello and Daniel Pesca on piano.
Florence Price’s romantic, Afro-American expressive power (Fantasy No. 1 for Violin and Piano) kicks off the programme, followed by Rebecca Clarke’s brilliant Piano Trio, a masterpiece with a post-Debussy feel, and whose final movement explodes into a country dance that would not have displeased Prokofiev.
This is followed by a delightful but short Sonatina for violin and piano by Carlos Chavez, bathed in Stravinskian neoclassicism, in which the Mexican composer inserts discreet but refined allusions to the folklore of his homeland.
Olivier Messiaen is represented by his magnificent Thème et Variations for violin and piano, written in 1932. Here we can recognise, sketched out, the harmonies that were to become the indelible signature of his mature music. Here, they still orbit around a modern chromatic tonality, that of a post-impressionism mixed with atonal temptations. This Theme and Variation is like the expression of a magic hour, a kind of premonitory and stylistic dawn before the explosion of exotic multicoloured flashes that were to become the French composer’s future scores.
Martinu, one of the most famous neo classicists, is ironically rather ambiguous in his Duo No. 1 for violin and cello H 157. The angular, sinuous harmonies and contrapuntal density almost make this a neo-Baroque piece rather than a neo-classical one. The writing is as finely chiselled as ever, that said, and the vigorous momentum of the final Rondo adds a welcome touch of truculence to the whole.
Very fine, accurate performances from the three artists involved, Colin Stokes, Daniel Pesca and Hannah Hurwitz. For the record, Hurwitz is the sister of Justin Hurwitz, a film composer closely associated with director Damien Chazelle, for whom he wrote, among other things, the score for the Oscar-winning La La Land.
