Classical CD Review: “Between The Notes – Music For Violin and Piano”

Pianist Constantine Finehouse and violinist Daniel Kurganov are well-matched musicians, and have recorded a superb album.

Between The Notes – Music For Violin and Piano, Daniel Kurganov & Constantine Finehouse, Spice Classics.

By Susan Miron

In their thoughtful liner notes for this album, the Kurganov/Finehouse duo write about how they wanted this recording to make a personal statement, which “swayed us to use ribbon microphones for our sessions, which are prized for their natural frequency response.” I was intrigued, compounded when I found out Belorussian-American violinist Daniel Kurganov “first picked up a violin at the age of 16.” How refreshing! I would seriously like to know about ribbon microphones. (The sound was excellent).

Pianist Constantine Finehouse is well-known to Boston audiences, although this lovely CD is my introduction to his playing. He has performed and recorded with other fine string players, attended a string of spiffy music schools, and now teaches at NEC Prep. He has certainly chosen his musical partners well. He and Kurganov are well-matched musicians, and Finehouse has had enough experience to know how to play sensitively (read: not overpoweringly) when the other musician is given important lines. He has made a specialty of the piano music of William Bolcom, but seems comfortable in many different styles.

Kurganov lists a variety of teachers, including Rudolf Koelman, protégé of Jascha Heifetz; his playing here reminded me time and again of Heifetz’s performance style. One of the standouts was a fabulous performance of George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (arranged by Heifetz). Kurganov used several Heifitz-like slides, quite effectively, I must say. The two musicians really let loose on this beloved piece, my favorite on a quite successful album.

The CD opens with Brahms’ peaceful, almost pastorale, Sonata for Piano and Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 100. I am exceedingly fond of this piece, and the duo paid it polished justice. Kurganov’s violin playing was simply beautiful; he supplied the requisite building passion. I grew up loving the Julius Katchen/Josef Suk recording of all three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano. (*Katchen was my cousin), which must now be over 25 years old.

The rest of Between the Notes consists of shorter pieces, most of them rather unknown works by familiar composers. (Again, how refreshing!)

Serge Prokofiev is represented here by “5 Mélodies,” Op. 35b. The Russian composer, of course, wrote brilliantly for violin (2 concerti, a sonata, another sonata written initially for flute). These five charming encore pieces should be appearing on more concert programs. They are delightful miniatures, “songs without words,” full of wit, bittersweet lyricism, and playfulness, very much like Prokofiev’s music in general.

Richard Wagner’s “Ein Albumblatt” WWV 94, 1861, began life as a piano piece, but soon found new life when a friend of Wagner, violinist August Wilhelmj, rearranged it for violin and piano, turning it into a piece far more dramatic, including some grand-scale virtuosity.

Ernest Bloch’s “Three pictures of Hasidic Life: Nigun” (Improvisation or Melody) from his 1923 suite Baal Shem (Master of the Good Name) pays homage to the soulful (pre WWII) cantorial tradition in Eastern Europe. The piece was written in memory of his mother. Bloch wrote about the composition: “What interests me is the Jewish soul, the enigmatic, ardent, turbulent soul that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible… It is all this that I endeavor to hear in myself and transcribe in my music, the venerable emotion of the race that slumbers way down in our souls.” In their program notes, Kurganov/Finehouse note that “early audio recordings bear witness to the striking resemblance in the temperament and way in which (these cantors) moved between the notes.” Kurganov gives a tour de force performance, superbly impassioned.

Tchaikovsky is represented in two beautiful performances. The first, “Berceuse. Op. 16, No. 1 (1872), is the duo’s homage to Clara Rockmore, a brilliant violinist whose career was cut short in an accident. She later took up a more exotic instrument — the theremin. She apparently became its first and “arguably only true classical virtuoso. Her interpretations,” Kurganov and Finehouse write in their notes, “were a hauntingly beautiful melding of the human voice and the violin.” The piece was originally scored for soprano but, unlike many songs, works very well on the violin. The other piece, which I hadn’t known before and liked enormously, is “Valse SentimentalE,” initially conceived as a piano solo, part of 6 Pieces, Op. 51 (1882), but now a rather popular encore for violin and piano.

Boston composer Tony Schemmer (b. 1946) is obviously a favorite of Finehouse. A concert reviewed (in the Boston Musical Intelligencer) with Finehouse and cellist Sebastian Bäverstam evoked this from its critic:

Unlike music that can achieve little beyond simply washing over the listener, Schemmer’s writing possesses a physicality inviting you to feel part of the process of its coming alive in performance. While this sort of direct connection obtained throughout the concert, it seemed especially evident in A Toney Tango, as performed so memorably by cellist Sebastian Bäverstam and pianist Constantine Finehouse, whose gripping, transportive reading was every bit itself a dance consistent with the art of tango.

Schemmer’s piece, which works well for violin and cello though it was originally written for piano trio, is “A Toney Tango – Incidental music for the play Buzzwords,” a triple pun. The liner notes describe the piece aptly: “The tango spirit is immersed in ardor, fervor, irony and sometimes near hysteria… It can almost seem more like a duel than a partnership. Their movements are brutal yet vulnerable, as if sublimating a turbulent relationship in their art.” The work is full of charm, a terrific duo composition that is performed, as are so many other selections on this album, terrifically.


Susan Miron, a harpist, has been a book reviewer for over 20 years for a large variety of literary publications and newspapers. Her fields of expertise were East and Central European, Irish, and Israeli literature. Susan covers classical music for The Arts Fuse and The Boston Musical Intelligencer.

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