Album: Ysaÿe, Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, opus 27 – Tai Murray (Harmonia Mundi)

Eugène Ysaÿe's 1924 sonatas anticipate the memorial beauty of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Suites for Unaccompanied Violin by three years and the desolate fury of Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin by two decades.

Bach is the touchstone, a source of melancholy, inspiration and obsession. Tai Murray's reading is vivid and imaginative: elegant in the baroque double-stopping of the first sonata, feverish in the second, sheer and smooth in the fourth, flirtatious in the sixth.