Arpeggione Sonata
Our debut recording
Franz Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata
Fueled by Viennese joy and melancholy, and New Haven pizza.
Our first self-produced, independent recording project. With a budget of $2,000 we recorded, engineered, and released an EP - which gave us the experience and confidence we needed to create the much more ambitious Wagner’s Nightmare album.
Program Notes
I. Allegro moderato - Franz Schubert, famous for three-minute lieder and hour-long chamber works, composed the rather normal-durationed Arpeggione Sonata in 1824 at the request of arpeggione virtuoso, Vincenz Schuster. The arpeggione, essentially a bowed guitar, went extinct soon afterwards, and so did the sonata. It was not rediscovered and published until 1871, when Breitkopf and Hartel was compiling the complete works of Schubert. A cello transcription was included and violists soon after laid their claim. The challenges of playing a piece written for a six-stringed instrument on four string instruments, have been, well, challenging the C-string community for the century and a half since. But this is not the forum for airing my grievances, especially after so much effort has gone into hiding the difficulties of this piece. Read more…
