Mozart Violin Sonatas (Schneider & Kirkpatrick)

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

This Sunday is the birthday of the Lithuanian-born violinist, conductor and teacher Alexander Schneider (1908-1993), perhaps best known for his work with the Budapest String Quartet, of which he was second violinist from 1932 to 1944 and again from 1956 to their disbanding in 1967.  In between his two stints with the Quartet, he was involved in a variety of projects, perhaps the most famous being organizing the Prades Festival with Pablo Casals.  One of the most intriguing projects was a fruitful collaboration begun in 1944 with the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911-1984), which even resulted in a number of contemporary works being written for them, including a sonata by Milhaud and a Sonatina by Walter Piston.  They recorded the latter work, as well as six Bach sonatas, six by Handel, and eight by Mozart.  The duo's first appearance on records was this album of three Mozart sonatas:

Mozart: Violin Sonatas, K. 296, 378 and 379
Alexander Schneider, violin; Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichord
Recorded November 26-28, 1945
Columbia Masterworks set MM-650, six 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 132.25 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 70.02 MB)

At the time, the substitution of a harpsichord for the piano in these works was somewhat controversial, and still might raise some eyebrows; but it must be understood that the pianos of Mozart's time were actually closer in sonority to the harpsichord than to the modern grand piano, and in 1945 replicas of fortepianos (the term that has come to be used for early pianos) were still a good twenty or thirty years in the future.  So the use of the harpsichord here represents a compromise, although in truth it works better in the earliest Mozart violin sonatas than in the later ones.  Ralph Kirkpatrick, with all his artistry, was probably the only harpsichordist at the time who was able to pull it off convincingly.