Bruno Monteiro & Joao Paulo Santos: Prokofiev: Two Violin Sonatas, Five Melodies
Etcetera

Over the last quarter-century, Portuguese violinist Bruno Monteiro has established himself as a highly respected recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician, and recording artist. He's performed at many of the globe's most esteemed venues, including Vienna's Musikverein, Kiev's Philharmonic Hall, and New York's Carnegie Hall, and has partnered with pianist João Paulo Santos for over twenty years. While earlier recordings feature the music of Lopes-Graça, Szymanowski, and Schulhoff, those issued since 2020 on Etcetera Records present material by Stravinsky, Ravel, Villa-Lobos, Chausson, Ysaÿe, and Korngold. Monteiro now enhances his discography with a set that has an air of inevitability about it, a collection devoted exclusively to pieces by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953).

While Monteiro's playing doesn't lack for technical polish, it's tinged with a raw, at times rustic quality that makes it instantly identifiable as his. It's a style perfectly suited to the music of Prokofiev, which is by turns romantic, wry, rhapsodic, and sardonic and likewise oscillates between elegance and rawness. Monteiro's graced any number of concert hall stages, yet a typical performance by him exudes an intimacy that makes it feel as if it's transpiring before an enchanted group in a cozy living room. As always, Santos provides eloquent support, the pianist ever-reliable and unerring in the foundation he gives his recital partner.

The release couples the composer's Five Melodies for Violin and Piano, Op. 35bis with the Sonata no. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 (1946) and the Sonata no. 2 in D major, Op. 94bis (1944), the latter transcribed from the Sonata in D major for Flute and Piano, Op. 94 written a year earlier (because Prokofiev wrote parts of the F minor sonata in 1938, he designated it his ‘first' violin sonata despite the fact that its formal date of composition is two years after the second).

Among the noteworthy details about the oft-solemn F-minor Sonata is that two of its movements, the first and third, were performed by Prokofiev's close friend, David Oistrakh, as the composer lay in state in Moscow the day after his death (the work was dedicated to the Soviet violinist, and Oistrakh also premièred the piece). The “Andante Assai” movement introduces the work sombrely, its nightmarish tone consistent with the composer's dictum to Oistrakh that it should sound like “wind in a graveyard.” While the piano part's low-register creep is suitably brooding, the violin part cries in seeming anguish until it arrestingly glides up and down the scales. Having survived that dark night of the soul, the sonata dusts itself off for the energized “Allegro brusco,” with Monteiro delivering an inspired and wholly committed reading. Things turn rhapsodic when the violinist, buoyed by Santos's sparkling accompaniment, emotes serenely through the flowing “Andante,” after which the breathless “Allegrissimo” brings the work to a frantic, roller coaster-like close, the violin reprising its earlier glide one more time.

In the summer of 1943, Prokofiev took a break from crafting his opera War and Peace and the soundtrack to Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible to compose his flute sonata, which, as mentioned, was transcribed for violin a year later at Oistrakh's request. Of the work, Prokofiev said he wanted the sonata “to have a classical, clear, transparent sonority,” and for that reason a connecting line could be drawn from it to his popular Classical Symphony. In contrast to the eeriness with which the first sonata opens, the beguiling “Moderato” that inaugurates the second is romantic sweetness incarnate, and the instrumentalists seem to bask in its alluring glow. Marked “Presto,” the scherzo is dazzlingly acrobatic, the “Andante” an expression of warm, cantabile splendour, and the “Allegro con brio” a rousing finale crowned by a memorable theme.

October 2025