Before he left Dublin to study at Cambridge, the teenage Stanford (at the time an aspiring fiddler) was fortunate enough to experience a wealth of fine chamber music played by such luminaries of the day as Vieuxtemps, Alfredo Piatti, Joseph Joachim (who would often stay at the family home, and whose Beethoven and Bach left a profound impression on the young Charles) and the Austrian violinist Ludwig Straus. Straus (later a great favourite of Queen Victoria’s, by the way) was a stalwart of many a recital that Stanford helped put on for the Cambridge University Musical Society, and the 24-year-old composer’s engaging First Violin Sonata bears a dedication to him. It is an enormously fluent and stylish achievement, full of striking invention (the eventful finale especially so), strongly indebted to Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, yet already a big advance on his own First Symphony of the previous year.
Unlike the First Sonata, its substantial four-movement successor was never published. It was probably written in 1898 and may have been intended for Enrique Fernandez Arbos (the Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music, to whom Stanford subsequently inscribed his Op. 74 Concerto). By now, Stanford had well and truly assimilated the three Brahms sonatas, and the German master’s influence is most keenly felt in the tumbling lyricism of the opening Allegro comodo (and its richly coloured E major second subject in particular). From deceptively simple beginnings, the slow movement grows into an impassioned outpouring, while the uncomplicated Scherzo acts as necessary respite before the high drama of the finale (which unexpectedly sets out in the minor).
Completed in October 1893, the deeply-felt, seven-minute ‘Caoine’ (‘A Lament’) is the first of the six Op. 54 Irish Fantasies, a collection which drew high praise from George Bernard Shaw (he particularly relished ‘the entire absence of professorial spirit proper to genuine Irish violinism’). Stanford’s mastery of the miniature is further demonstrated in the Five Characteristic Pieces, Op. 93 (1905), each of which is an exquisitely cut gem in its own right but which together also form a most satisfyingly contrasted sequence (towards the end of the last piece, ‘L’envoi’, the piano even wistfully quotes the main theme from the opening ‘Cavatina and Scherzino’).
As on their two previous Hyperion releases of music by Howells and Ireland (3/94 and 11/96), Paul Barritt and Catherine Edwards forge an exemplary alliance. Not only is their playing consummately refined and joyously articulate, they bring plenty of panache and dedication to this immensely attractive repertoire. The engineering is vividly truthful, and Jeremy Dibble’s booklet-essay is a masterclass in itself! Recommended without reservation.'