Alina Ibragimova & Cédric Tiberghien

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh - 30/09/24

 Alina Ibragimova – violin; Cédric Tiberghien – piano.

The New Town chamber concert series (though now mostly located on the south side of the city) is always one of the highlights of the classical music calendar in Edinburgh. Over the coming months it will feature the Leonkoro Quartet, Quatuor Van Kuijk with Sean Shibe, and the Carducci String Quartet.

But the series began this year with a sparkling and varied programme of music from Janáček, Enescu, Gerald Barry and Beethoven, performed by the well-established if still-youthful occasional duo of Russian-born violinist Alina Ibragimova and French pianist Cédric Tiberghien.

 Opening with Leos Janáček’s innovative, four-movement Violin Sonata (composed and revised over a period of eight years, starting in 1914), Ibragimova and Tiberghien rapidly established their instinctive musical rapport and their ability to deliver and swap the evolving riffs, lines, phrases and textures which abound in this fascinating work. It is one which grows on me every time I hear it.

The first movement opens with melodic fragments that move from almost aggressively impassioned to song-like. The ballade is achingly beautiful, culminating in a snowfall of notes towards the end. The scherzo-like allegretto includes some tight, stabbing unison playing and delicate pizzicato. In closing, the adagio features haunting, piano-shaped melodies and agitated interjections from the violin, reminding us that the backdrop to this sonata is a combination of human longing and the stark interruptions of war and conflict.

 An important feature of Janáček’s sometimes underrated sonata are the Czech folk music elements that he also employed in his operas. In programming terms, this paved the way well for Romanian violin maestro George Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 25. Widely considered one of the masterworks of  the form, this was written four years after Janáček made the final revisions to his own piece.

Again, Enescu’s work displays prominent folk-like features. But these are Enescu’s own inventions rather than direct melodic borrowings, and they are weaved into a sophisticated, three-movement structure which includes some energetic dances, the deployment of lingering, mysterious harmonics in the second movement, and a compellingly unpredictable combination of tight structure and improvisatory feel overall.

 This is a sonata which demands rapid and virtuosic shifts of complex rhythm, style, voicing and approach – including some tricky quarter-tones. Ibragimova handled it all with a relaxed (but where necessary, urgent) and accomplished performance, perfectly syncing with Tiberghien’s evocation of the sonata’s distinctly south-eastern European sound world.

The main work after the interval was Beethoven’s acclaimed Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 7 (‘Kreutzer’). But as a charmingly off-kilter warm up to that, we enjoyed a brief but entertaining piece from the contemporary Welsh composer Gerald Barry, whose work deserves far more attention than it currently gets. ‘Triorchic Blues’ began as a musical sketch which eventually led to his 1992 two-act opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, itself based on the dramatic framework of Handel’s The Triumph of Time and Truth. It celebrates one of the Baroque giant’s castrato singers in a tongue-in-cheek way.

 This piece exists in versions for piano, violin, trumpet and voice. Tonight’s performance combined the piano and violin versions, with a bouncing, evolving and continuous dance-like feel. The shifting and melding time signatures sound almost like progressive rock at times. Ibragimova and Tiberghien had great fun with its exuberant style, punctuated by a lisping, slow interlude. What an unusual delight.

As a piece of wise programming, Barry’s slightly surreal inventions offered no useful parallel to the Beethoven, save perhaps the fact that its eventual dedicatee, the Paris Conservatoire’s first violin professor, Rodolphe Kreutzer, unfortunately regarded it as “outrageously unintelligible”. This is a verdict history was not about to share. Opening with unaccompanied violin, this was a powerful, passionate performance that felt exactly like the stretching musical conversation between the two instruments which Beethoven clearly envisioned. The darker elements in the concluding Presto were especially well captured.

 It is a pity that Beethoven fell out with this sonata’s original dedicatee, the Black violin virtuoso George Bridgetower, who gave its 1803 premiere in Vienna. But Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien brought it to life for Edinburgh in a fresh and convincing way once again. A fitting end to a fine, imaginative and well-received concert, with more treats promised in the New Town series.