After finishing working on the new publication of Ysaÿe’s until now unpublished second string trio, I started to re-edit the first, “Le Chimay” Trio.
As I mentioned in an earlier text, the first publication of the first trio by Schott Music was unfortunately far from perfect, full of mistakes, misprints, and actually many wrong notes, corrected later by Ysaÿe himself. It took me a few months to work over this great chamber music piece. I had to change also many of the “Finale” settings, since I have now a much later softvare version than back at the time when the original file was written.
Turned out very nicely and sounds really great, pleasantly cleared out all the questionable spots.
We have now both Trios also as printed sheet music at music stores and of course as pdf’s here available.
But at the moment all these works were finished, I felt suddenly that I am missing something, – that after many years of working on Ysaÿe’s music I still should find more of his wonderful compositions. The violin Poème’s were absolutely wonderful for me, both, working on editing and also playing them, so I had a look at the two “duo” Poème’s, Poème Nocturne Op. 29 and Amitié Op. 26 and decided to make new editions of these also.
The last (well, first) printed versions are from the same time as the other Poème’s, close to hundred years back now, (1927) so I guess it was time to make them available in a nicer, better legible and corrected new version.
They are written originally, like all the Poème’s, with orchestra but with Ysaÿe’s own piano reductions all sound really great. However, we had to invent some obvious changes to make easier to read for the pianists. All the single violin Poème’s are edited in this way, so we are working on these last two the same way. The piano parts are with my pianist partner at this moment, and the cello part of the Nocturne with a friend of mine. Especially in this cello part, I found some interesting passages, a bit similar to the technique he was often using for the violin, that need some tricks to play them, so some fingerings will be also in the cello part included.
I am still looking for a great cellist with whom I could make a recording of Poème Nocturne, this amazing piece of music, and I already found (well, hopefully – we didn’t try it yet) a marveleous violinist to do the Amitié with.
Also, all the newly edited Poème’s will be recorded soon, hopefully still in this year. We had already couple of intense rehearsals and waiting for the finishing these last two to do all at the same time.
I would really like to encourage all my colleagues to discover how wonderful, how much fun is to play the music by Ysaÿe, that there is much more than only the six sonatas for solo violin!