This illuminating release is the brainchild of violinist-musicologist Katharina Uhde, who has established herself in recent years as an avid and multifaceted advocate of Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), the Austro-Hungarian violinist and composer. Among her contributions to date are an excellent scholarly monograph on Joachim's music,Footnote ¹ an international conference,Footnote ² updates to Joachim's works list in Grove Music Online,Footnote ³ and a scholarly/performance edition of two recently rediscovered compositions for violin and orchestra: Joachim's Fantasy on Hungarian Themes (1848–50) and his Fantasy on Irish Themes (1852).Footnote ⁴ The two fantasies receive their world-premiere recordings on the present album, whose programme is completed with two shorter Joachim compositions, both of lyrical character: (1) the Romance, op. 2 no. 1 (c. 1849, performed in a c. 1900 arrangement with orchestral accompaniment) and (2) the Notturno, op. 12 (1858). All tracks feature Uhde as violin soloist, performing with the Polish Radio Orchestra Warsaw led by Dennis Friesen-Carper.

Since the fantasies were nearly lost to history, the story of their recent rediscovery warrants recounting here.Footnote ⁵ In 1943, at the height of World War II, the bulk of the collection of the Berlin Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik was hastily evacuated to a number of safer locations. Many rare items turned up two years later in Poland at the newly established University of Łódź, including Manuscript 10849, a bound volume comprising Joachim's holographs of the two violin fantasies plus his cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto (composed 1853).Footnote ⁶ The manuscript seems to have attracted little interest even after Christoph Wolff examined the Berlin Hochschule materials in Łódź and published a list of notable items that specified the contents of Manuscript 10849.Footnote ⁷ Wolff's report was, thus, the first indication in modern scholarship that these early Joachim fantasies, long presumed lost, were in fact extant, but it is only now, some decades later and through Uhde's initiative, that they are finally gaining renewed interest.

Yet that is only half the story, as the provenance of the manuscripts before World War II is mysterious, too. Since Joachim himself founded the Berlin Hochschule (in 1869, originally known as the Königlich Akademische Hochschule für Musik), one might imagine that it was he who deposited his unpublished fantasies in the collection. But, as Uhde has shown, the actual route was far more circuitous. Whereas Joachim had performed both pieces for a few years following their respective dates of composition, they both soon fell out of his concert repertoire, and the composer did not publish them, instead allowing the manuscripts to circulate privately, passing through the hands of a family friend and subsequently to his student Henri Petri. Evidently the composer lost track of the manuscripts’ whereabouts and purportedly even told his assistant and biographer Andreas Moser that he had destroyed them, as he had several youthful compositions. It must therefore have been with some astonishment that, after the composer's death in 1907, Moser was gifted the bound manuscript volume by Petri, who had possessed it since his studies with Joachim in the 1870s and who envisioned that Moser might coordinate with the composer's heirs to arrange for a posthumous publication.Footnote ⁸ Such an edition never materialized, and the whereabouts of the manuscript for the ensuing decades is unknown. But Uhde speculates that it was likely included among various Joachim materials (concert programmes, photographs, correspondence, etc.) furnished in 1931 by the composer's son, Johannes, to the Hochschule,Footnote ⁹ where it remained until its wartime evacuation to Poland.

This story illustrates just how easily the fantasies might have been forgotten – if Joachim had indeed destroyed them along with several other youthful works, if Petri had not gifted them to Moser, if they had not been relocated during the war – but also just how easily they might have remained a (figurative) scholarly footnote in Moser's biography or Wolff's research report, had Uhde not devoted herself to preparing an edition and recording.

Before encountering Uhde's work, I was mostly familiar with Joachim through his youthful mentorship by Felix Mendelssohn and extended association with Johannes Brahms, his championing violin concerti by Ludwig van Beethoven and Mendelssohn and solo violin music of J.S. Bach, his devotion to chamber music through the Joachim Quartet, and his pedagogical legacy as founder of the Berlin Hochschule and through his Violinschule.Footnote ¹⁰ My impression of Joachim as a violinist of a traditionalist bent was informed particularly by an essay on musical interpretation included in the Violinschule that positions him as heir to a classical French school with roots in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, transmitted to Joachim through his teacher Joseph Böhm and suited to the performance of ‘the masters of instrumental music from Haydn to Mendelssohn’.Footnote ¹¹ The essay draws a sharp contrast between the ‘natural singing and healthy music-making’ of this classic French violin tradition and the ‘bad manner of performance and complete lack of style’ of the modern, virtuoso/soloistic Franco-Belgian school,Footnote ¹² reserving particular disdain for corrupting influence of ‘heroic-pathetic opera’ as a cause of ‘spiritual decline’ in modern French violin music.Footnote ¹³

Against this rather sober picture of the mature Joachim's artistic outlook, Joachim's early violin fantasies reveal a markedly different sort of musician: a composer of airs variés conceived for virtuoso spectacle and appealing to popular tastes through dramatic musical effects, a violinist who (after Mendelssohn's death in 1847) relocated from Leipzig to Weimar to join Franz Liszt's circle, serving as his Hofconcertmeister beginning in 1850.Footnote ¹⁴ Both fantasies prominently showcase virtuoso techniques, including multiple stops and chords, thorny left-hand passages (e.g. chromatic scales and arpeggios), and various ‘showy’ bow strokes (e.g. ricochet, flying staccato, sautillé, and spiccato).Footnote ¹⁵ Uhde refers to the period 1840s–1852 as Joachim's ‘virtuoso phase’, during which his ‘fascination and engagement with virtuosity found its most concentrated expression’, owing in part to the demands of London concert agents, who required newly composed virtuoso showpieces for bookings.Footnote ¹⁶ The two rediscovered fantasies thus flesh out this lesser-known period of Joachim's career as violinist and composer.

The Fantasy on Hungarian Themes served as Joachim's introduction to the Weimar public: he performed it, to critical acclaim, with Liszt conducting on 19 October 1850, just days after he arrived in the city to take up his position as concertmaster.Footnote ¹⁷ Composed as a single movement, unfolding through sections of contrasting tempos, moods and musical styles (march topics, freer ad libitum passages and a friss-like perpetual-motion finale section). Throughout the piece, Joachim incorporates many elements associated with style hongrois representations of a Hungarian ‘exotic’ other, such as syncopation, augmented seconds, una corda passages in the low register and certain characteristic verbunkos rhythmic and cadential figures.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether Joachim's turn to a Hungarian topos reflects the composer's ambivalence about his national identity as a German-speaking Jew originating in Hungary (as Uhde speculates),Footnote ¹⁹ or simply an appeal to a popular style (perhaps one that would meet Liszt's favour?) or some combination of factors, makes for interesting speculation.

The so-called Fantasy on Irish Themes, which was composed second, but which opens the album, is actually based on the Scottish songs ‘John Anderson My Jo’ and ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’, which are developed in virtuoso variations throughout the fantasy's various sections and combined through thematic transformation in the spirited final section. The premiere performance was with the London Philharmonic Society on 31 May 1852, with the programme listing the title as ‘Fantasia for Violin, “Scotch Airs”’.Footnote ²⁰ The designation ‘Irish’ seems to originate in a later, handwritten annotation on the manuscript (not made by the composer), and the erroneous title has stuck in the scholarly literature. But, given that Joachim performed this fantasy under the title Scottish title, that the piece features such signifiers as the ‘Scotch snap’, and that the source material clearly refers to Scotland – the one melody associated with a Robert Burns poem and the other mentioning Scotland in the title – one wonders if it might be time to drop the (erroneous) designation ‘Irish’ for this composition.

Uhde, an excellent violinist, rises to the many challenges in both fantasies, delivering brilliant, bravura performances and bold interpretation that match the dramatic character of these pieces, making this album a pleasure to hear on its own terms (and not only for music-historical interest). It is no surprise that a sense of devotion to this repertoire infuses both her scholarship and her performances, but it is a rare individual who can perform both at such a high level.

To the Romance from op. 2 and the Notturno, op. 12, she brings lyricism, warm tone and flowing rubato, supported by Friesen-Carper's sensitive and flexible accompaniment. Readers of the Joachim/Moser violin treatise will recognize both pieces; the former is mentioned in a discussion of song-like performance, the latter in connection with preserving tone colour within lyrical phrases with una corda fingerings.Footnote ²¹ The Romance from op. 2, reminiscent of Schumann's miniatures, was a favourite of the composer's, and he performed it many times spanning his entire career.Footnote ²² To my knowledge, this album is the world-premiere recording of the version with orchestral accompaniment. Curious listeners can hear complete recordings of op. 2 (all three pieces), performed in the original version with piano, on at least two albums available on NAXOS Music Library.Footnote ²³

Joseph Joachim: Two Fantasies Rediscovered is packaged in an attractive box, with programme notes by Uhde provided in German, English, Serbo-Croatian, and French. Scholars will prefer to consult the more detailed commentary and analysis in Uhde's Joachim monograph, from which these programme notes are condensed. In sum, this album is a highly valuable contribution to our understanding of Joseph Joachim's early period, bringing to light his earliest surviving compositions for violin with orchestra, and thereby offering a more complete picture of the history of virtuoso solo-violin music in the nineteenth century.