Sonata C Minor no. 9 op. 139 (1915)
1 Con passione 9:26
2 Largo 6:19
3 Vivace 4:57
4 Andantino con variazioni 12:33

Sonata C Major no. 4 op. 72 (1904)
5 Allegro con spirito 11:06
6 Prestissimo 2:54
7 Largo con gran espressione 7:35
8 Allegro con brio 9:20

Total 64:15

Johannes Prelle, Violin
Thomas Günther, Piano

The selection of these two sonatas for this CD is not coincidental as both are milestones in the oeuvre of Max Reger. Reger’s Violin Sonata op. 72, the fourth in his series of nine contributions to this genre, was composed in the summer of 1903 and experienced its premiere in November of that same year in Munich. Perhaps not this first presentation, but certainly the performances the following year by the Belgian violinist Henri Marteau caused a sensation of sorts – at the 40th Tonkünstlerversammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins (Musicians Convention of the General German Music Association) in Frankfurt, subsequently also in Berlin, Genève, and Lausanne, each time with Reger on the piano – and were tantamount to a breakthrough for the composer. From then on he was considered, alongside Richard Strauss (and, in the broader public perception, ahead of Arnold Schoenberg), the most extreme exponent of musical modernity, and either celebrated or feared, but always with acknowledgement of his undoubted technical mastery. In contrast to the polemic character of op. 72, the Violin Sonata op. 139, written in the spring of 1915, appears like a counter-image or corrective: the first movement is developed with strict economy out of the concise main theme, which already in the second measure begins to play with the meter in a Brahmsian manner. The composer thought very highly of this sonata, and even saw an “entirely new style” presaged in it – and indeed, the work stands out greatly from many an earlier composition in its tendency toward motivic economy combined with an intensification of detail. One year, one month, and one day after the completion of his Violin Sonata, op. 138, Reger was dead.