Violin Sonata op. 8

Composed in 1892 and published by Durand in 1894, Camille Chevillard’s violin sonata has long been overlooked. Overshadowed by his prominence as a virtuoso pianist, then as an orchestral conductor, his activities as a composer of chamber music must also have suffered from the extremely cold reception, in the early 1890s, of his Piano Quintet Op. 1, notably after its performance by the composer with the Ysaÿe Quartet at the Cercle des Vingt in Brussels. Like the first of Saint-Saëns’s two violin sonatas (1885), Opus 8 proposes a regrouping of its movements into two distinct parts. There are, however, three homogeneous rhythmic atmospheres: after a constantly changing Mouvement modéré, the second part is split clearly in two, with a Très lent, followed by a Mouvement de polonaise. From the initial G minor to the final G major, Chevillard unfolds a fairly broad harmonic palette at the service of brilliant virtuosity. The use of French terms to describe the different movements is perfectly in line with a fin-de-siècle aesthetic that the author shared with Guillaume Lekeu and others. Nevertheless the influences that are most perceptible in this work are those of César Franck and Vincent d'Indy. We owe its rediscovery to Jean-Jacques Kantorow and his son Alexandre, who made the first recording in 2014 (“French sonatas”, NoMadMusic).