Sif Margrét Tulinius and Richard Simm: Beethoven & Franck
Ulysses Arts

It's safe to say 2025 was a highlight year for Icelandic violinist Sif Margrét Tulinius: her late-2024 album De Lumine was chosen record of the year by the Icelandic Music Awards in March 2025, that honour preceded by a concert at Reykjavik's renowned Harpa Recital Hall to celebrate the release. Born in Lyon, Tulinius moved at a young age to Iceland where she attended the Reykjavík College of Music before studying in the United States and acquiring her Master's degree from Stony Brook-New York under the guidance of Joel Smirnoff, professor of violin at the Juilliard School of Music. Building on that, she was Associate Concertmaster of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra for a number of years and has appeared with many other esteemed orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker. Equally comfortable playing works by Johann Sebastian Bach and contemporary Icelandic composers, she excels in a large-scale orchestral context but also in an intimate recital format, her follow-up to De Lumine a splendid account of her abilities in that regard.

Her partner on the release, recorded in Iceland in July 2025, is the also-renowned English pianist Richard Simm, an award-winning graduate of the Royal College of Music and Staatliche Hochschule für Musik and teacher at the University of Wales and University of Illinois. Having called Iceland home since 1989, performed with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and taught at the Iceland University of the Arts, it doesn't surprise that he would become Tulinius's recital partner for their recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's ‘Kreutzer' Sonata (1802-03) and César Franck's Sonata in A-major (1886). Eight decades separate their creation, yet they complement one another superbly, considering that Franck's is something of an homage to Beethoven but also a work that stands gloriously apart from it.

Interestingly, the recitalists go against chronological order by presenting Franck's first. That it was composed as a wedding gift for Eugène Ysaÿe intimates that its material will provide a splendid showcase to the violinist, and that's clearly the case. Franck's student days at the Paris Conservatoire included close studies of German music and Beethoven, so it also makes sense that the violin sonata would reflect that influence whilst also manifesting Franck's desire to give it a distinctly French character. A powerful exemplar of the Romantic sonata tradition, the work intoxicates the moment its haunting opening part, marked “Allegretto ben moderato,” initiates it with expressions by turns rhapsodic, elegiac, and forlorn. Whereas the emphatic “Allegro” bursts with energy and passion and the reverent “Recitativo–Fantasia” proves affecting, it's the sweetly singing “Allegretto poco mosso” movement that's perhaps most riveting. The two-instrument arrangement amplifies the work's intimacy, naturally; its expansive scope, on the other hand, lends it undeniable grandeur, and the recitalists execute the material with all the authority one would expect from such experienced players.

The ‘Kreutzer' Sonata is regarded as a transitional work that initiates the middle stage in Beethoven's compositional development after the first, the so-called Classical period, for reflecting the influence of Haydn and Mozart. Having shared with his student Carl Czerny dissatisfaction over the work he'd done up to 1802 and professing that henceforth he would “embark on a new path,” he composed the sonata, celebrated for its grand, dramatic, and intensely personal three-part expression. Introduced with Tulinius's arresting double stops, the towering “Adagio sostenuto – Presto” sketches out the territory before embarking on many adventures, some languorous and others animated. The dialogue conducted between recitalists who don't put a foot wrong makes for a gripping sixteen-minute ride. One imagines Franck would have found the dignified elegance of the pretty “Andante con Variazioni” movement to be especially enticing, and it stretches across a similarly vast landscape, in this case eighteen minutes. The boisterous “Presto” makes its case more concisely yet still memorably when its participants execute its high-wire acrobatics commandingly.

February 2026