The title Fiddler's Blues refers here only to the celebrated "Blues" slow movement of the Violin Sonata No. 2 in G major of Ravel; there's nothing particularly bluesy about the rest of the music on the album. Instead, French violinist Philippe Graffin offers a collection of French solo and piano-accompanied violin pieces, mostly little-known, and in three cases never before heard. The big news is the Sonate posthume pour violon seul, Op. 27bis: a seventh solo violin sonata to go with the existing six of Eugčne Ysa˙e. ...
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The title Fiddler's Blues refers here only to the celebrated "Blues" slow movement of the Violin Sonata No. 2 in G major of Ravel; there's nothing particularly bluesy about the rest of the music on the album. Instead, French violinist Philippe Graffin offers a collection of French solo and piano-accompanied violin pieces, mostly little-known, and in three cases never before heard. The big news is the Sonate posthume pour violon seul, Op. 27bis: a seventh solo violin sonata to go with the existing six of Eugčne Ysa˙e. Graffin found the work in manuscript at a library in Brussels, incomplete but largely having received its general shape, and completed it. One may speculate as to why the composer abandoned it; various good answers suggest themselves, from the coherence of the existing group of six to the difference in style of this one from the others: it's shorter, tonally more conservative, and generally simpler. This said, it's a genuine rediscovery of a work by a major composer, and to a...
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