Joseph and Lillian Fuchs (Part III): Mozart, Beethoven, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Copland & Thomson

Joseph and Lillian Fuchs (Part III of III)
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Serenade in D Major for Violin, Viola and Cello, Op. 8

Joseph Fuchs, Violin / Lillian Fuchs, Viola / Leonard Rose, Cello

(Decca, 1950)

Serenade in D major for Flute, Violin and Viola, Op. 25

Julius Baker, Flute / Joseph Fuchs, Violin / Lillian Fuchs, Viola

Trio in C minor for Violin, Viola and Cello, Op. 9, No. 3

Joseph Fuchs, Violin / Lillian Fuchs, Viola / Harry Fuchs, Cello

(Decca, 1951)

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
(first recording)

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791)

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 3 in G, KV 216

Joseph Fuchs, Violin
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Eugene Goossens

(Everest, 1959)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Duo Concertant

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Sonata for Violin and Piano

Joseph Fuchs, Violin / Leo Smit, Piano

(Decca, 1950)

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

Sonata da chiesa (1926)

Lillian Fuchs, Viola / Peter Simenauer, Clarinet
Fred Mills, Trumpet / Paul Ingraham, French Horn
Edward Erwin, Trombone
Virgil Thomson, Conductor
(Town Hall performance, New York City,
December 18, 1961)

Sonata for Violin and Piano (1930)

Joseph Fuchs, Violin / Artur Balsam, Piano
(Town Hall performance, New York City,
December 18, 1961)

(Composers Recordings, Inc., 1960's)
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From the notes for Beethoven's Trio in C minor, Op. 9, No. 3:

"Although Joseph and Lillian Fuchs have often been heard in joint recital, this recorded performance ... is the first occasion in which they are joined by their brother, the noted cellist, Harry Fuchs."

From the notes for "Virgil Thomson - Two Chamber Works and a Song Cycle":

"One of the more pentrating remarks about Virgil Thomson's music was made by a writer, the composer's friend Gertrude Stein. 'It's not at all banal,' Miss Stein affirmed. 'He frosts his music with a thin layer of banal sounds to put people off, but what's underneath is very pure and special.'

Offhand, there might seem to be more effective ways of putting people off: the use of an abstruse or involved style, for example. But in practice this does not always seem to follow. Unusual complexity can become a standard rhetorical device like any other, and the purpose of rhetoric is to lower sales resistance.

The artist who defies easy popularity by assuming a mask of simplicity is another matter. His pride of craft - and of character - is such that he deliberately invites sales resistance with unrelieved clarity, a thing that oddly confuses listeners. In modern music, Erik Satie is the prototype of this kind of heroically fastidious artist. And to the Virgil Thomson of the Twenties, a young composer in search of a hero, Satie's music was a revelation....

...In rejecting the successful post-Romantic musical forms, Thomson has actually carried much further than most of his contemporaries the construction of tonal works unprejudiced by market research....

He is in no way easy to pin down. You can't even rightly say, in the ordinary sense, that Thomson is out of fashion. For almost forty years he has worked at being out of it....

Much has been written about the simple surfaces of Thomson's music, next to nothing about its intricacies, its depths and darknesses. Yet so lucid an analyst as John Cage ... claims to have met the Devil himself in Thomson's music, particularly in the broodingly tortuous Tango of the 'Sonata da chiesa'....

..."The amazing final movement [of "Sonata da chiesa"> is called by Cage 'a fugue to end all fugues.'

...some of its measures [Thomson's 'Sonata for Violin and Piano'> are as much a love letter as any by Robert Schumann. It is also a sure-fire concert piece without a single embarassing concession to platform clichés, and I can't imagine why it hasn't been played to death."

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