Search - Ireland, Sammons, Grinke :: Violin Sonatas 1 & 2 / Phantasie Trio: Holy Boy

Historic performances of the highest caliber. Of particular interest here is Albert Sammons's vibrant 1930 version of the stunning Second Violin Sonata, a piece whose overwhelmingly successful premiere some 13 years earlier (with Sammons and pianist William Murdoch) had made Ireland's name virtually overnight. For the present Columbia recording (bafflingly, never released until now), Sammons is joined by the composer himself, and the results are never less than urgently communicative. Fifteen years later for Decca, Ireland teamed up with another consummate fiddler, Frederick Grinke, for a masterly, utterly heartwarming account of the First Sonata, a charming early work originally dating from 1909. Grinke next joins forces with cellist Florence Hooton and pianist Kendall Taylor to bestow memorably flexible and characterful advocacy to the one-movement Phantasie Trio in A Minor of 1908. That just leaves Hooton's touching rendering of that much-loved gem The Holy Boy (set down for Decca on the same day during November 1938 as the Phantasie Trio). All in all, a most valuable Ireland anthology. --Andrew Achenbach