Lekeu's Violin Sonata was commissioned by the titanic Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who gave the premiere before the elite subscription audience of Cercle XX in Brussels in March 1893, then took the work across Europe, laying the groundwork for its tenacious hold on the fringe repertoire -- an attractive novelty rather than an acclaimed masterpiece. Violinists from the young Yehudi Menuhin to Arthur Grumiaux, Lola Bobesco, Augustin Dumay, and Elmar Oliveira, among a host of less-known artists, made notable recordings of it, keeping it on the twentieth century horizon. Its ambiguous status may be explained by comparison. Lekeu met Albéric Magnard, five years older and apprenticed to Franck's apostle, Vincent d'Indy, at the 1889 Bayreuth Festival -- the visit on which Lekeu famously fainted during a performance of Tristan -- and immediately confided to his mother that Magnard had not made a good impression. "I saw neither a musician nor an artist in his palaver, but, above all, a keen wit, quite Parisian and street-smart, phenomenal perhaps but not given to anything serious." The saturnine Magnard's laconic earthiness grated on Lekeu's mercurially overflowing sensibilities, but he was wrong -- Magnard was already at work upon his First Symphony, while Lekeu would begin private lessons with Franck in the fall, turning to d'Indy as mentor following Franck's death in November 1890. Magnard's bluntness concealed creative anxieties, assuaged by a fetishistic regard for form -- nothing could be further from his powerfully calculated concatenations than Lekeu's ramshackle approach to composition, which, regardless of the considerable effort it consumed, wears an air of genially impassioned spontaneity nowhere more smilingly evident than in the Violin Sonata. Though he adheres to the dictates of sonata form, cyclically construed, Lekeu seems to be winging it. Beside his loose organization and fulsome writing, Magnard's works -- especially his own Violin Sonata (1901) -- are sculpted. With the first theme's confiding intimacy spurred by a brisk but no less effusive second idea, the first movement lifts into lyrical incandescence fanned by the susurrus of eternal youth to end in a coda of hushed rapture. Before such potent charm all caveats become irrelevant. The central movement opens and ends with a spellbinding berceuse, cyclically derived from the first movement's first theme, enclosing an exquisitely dreaming episode Très simplement et dans le sentiment d'un chant populaire. And in good cyclic fashion, the last movement -- a sweeping exaltation of serene blitheness rippled with virtuoso flourishes -- brings back the first movement's germinating first theme to end the work. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
