Brighton Year-Round 2025

Kwanita Lau and Charles Tam Violin/Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

Kwanita Lau and Charles Tam

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Violinist Kwanita Lau and pianist Charles Tam step in to give a recital of French/Belgian violin and piano sonatas. With two solo items in-between. Lau is a Royal Academy of Music graduate, undertaking further studies. Tam is a Hong Kong and Guildhall graduate, currently a Fellow of the latter.

They gave a memorable performance last July of Schumann’s first two violin sonatas. Here, they step in at short notice for an indisposed colleague.

The Debussy Violin Sonata in G minor is a melancholic resisting. It’s the key of his first mature work, the 1893 String Quartet: and this Sonata was to be his last, from 1916-17.

It was third in a projected secret of chamber works which Debussy never lived to complete. Consciously undertaken to show “what a sick man can still do in wartime” it’s infused with a particularly dark period of the war for the allies.

G minor amongst other things is traditionally the key of death and grieving. It does seem though that Debussy comes full circle to his first full-voiced masterpiece. It’s more compressed though. The sigh and opening of the first movement is like an energetic lament.

The Scherzo central section is a skittish relief with figurations on the piano out of Debussy’s recent 12 Etudes, and that holds for the finale too. The work then moves from slow to fast, the violin itself shadowy and full of a dark radiance and spectral intensity that elides the obvious sonata development The Finale with its rocket-like leaps and cascades downwards recalls the ‘Fireworks’ Etude. The climactic affirmation bursts just like one, as a wry provisional joy over a darkened Paris. Lau and Tam are wholly inside tis delicate, but robustly individual late sound-world.

Tam returns to play a solo item: Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 11. It’s one of the middling-known but certainly not least if his 19. Here though it’s been given a treatment by Arcady Volodos (b.1972) renowned for his arrangements and playing those of others. You’d think a straight Liszt virtuoso work would hardly need Volodos’ attentions.

The result though is gloriously golden-era gilding, and the Liszt if anything is enhanced. Liszt could hardly object given his own arrangements. The work in several sections glitters with glissandi and extraordinary finger work Tam is frankly dazzling in. The central section with the great Hungarian melody is realised with coruscations and octave leaps, scales and violent broken arpeggios. It’s quite stunning.

Lau returns for a solo Violin Sonata. The great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931) was in flashes a major composer when elsewhere premiering so many French composers’ violin works

Ysaye’s six solo Sonatas Op 27 – composed in a hotel room in 1923 – were dedicated to six fellow virtuosi. The second, to the great Jacques Thibaud, is also very funny. Its first movement entitled ‘Obsession” it starts by quoting Bach’s Vipin Partita No.3 in E and then the Dies Irae. Alluding to Thibaud’s favourite composer it plays off the violinist’s fixation, always breaking in (as Ysaye pretends) in at least the interpretation of other works. Lau is dolphin-like in her tonal swoops of delight and sheer exuberance here.

The work turns serious though with that Dies Irae, and after the opening in Bach’s E major it moves to the ‘Malincolia’ with the Dies Irae inflecting everything. From bright to dark is the opposite of Debussy’s experience in his work; and no less wondrous as Lau negotiates in a rapturous shading, the tenebrous world of those arcades of melancholy. They took seem death-haunted, a world slowly recovering from the war Debussy died during.

The Gabriel Fauré is belle époque. his Violin Sonata No 1 in A major Op 13 is the first great French Sonata of its kind, dating from 1878. It preceded Cesar Franck’s if 1886 and when people claimed that (premiered by Ysaye in gathering darkness when gas lamps failed) others retorted “Render unto Gabriel…”

And indeed this work is a joyous four-movement masterpiece. The Allegro molto is almost innocent tonally open, with none of the magnificent shadows of Fauré’s later work. It’s prime feature is a refrain of ascending scale-like melody in the violin rising from the lower G to well above the E, up to a top A.

The Andante is like a gentle premonition of Fauré’s more veiled manner. It is though with the more muscular assertions of the piano (In a manner of early Barcarolles yet to be written) a dialogue: the violin proposes a protagonist in still contemplation, almost slowing to Adagio, whilst the piano answers, first with more to its assertions, then calm colloquies of its own. It then decorates around the steady and slowly impassioned ascent of the violin to a hidden ecstasy of its own. It could easily be interpreted as erotic (Fauré was marrying at this time) and certainly rising in an ecstatic duet. As this progresses the pressure and volume increase, then like a similar Richard Strauss interlude, subside.

The Scherzo marked Allegro vivo is like a sudden bustle to a Parisian party. The scurrying and again skittish elements are interrupted by a more serious trio. Velocity though is unchecked if more moderate. It recalls the Andante, but at a busier pace. It ends in an outbreak of pizzicatos and a final reprise like an assertion of arrival.

The Finale Allegro quasi presto is an invitation to keep up the pace. Naturally it begins more slowly with a melody that sounds like rondo material. It soon speeds up with a marking like that though. There’s a vein of seriousness here too, picking up from the Andante. The violin leads with a development of the rondo-like theme. This builds in complexity and rhythmic counterpoint with violin and piano. There’s a call and refrain element and a realization that Elgar wasn’t so far from Fauré in his musical sound-world and drew inspiration from him. The work ends in a blaze of joy and belle époque sunlight. Outstanding. And at such short notice. We’ll welcome them again with luck next year.

Published July 2, 2025 by Simon Jenner