This album was recorded during the final year of Inja Stanović’s Leverhulme-funded research project (Re)constructing Early Recordings: a guide for historically-informed performance. As the title suggests, this project focused upon the technologies used to produce early recordings and, more specifically, the ways in which those recordings reveal performance practices of the past. The project was highly practical: a series of performing musicians were invited to produce brand new recordings, albeit using early recording technologies, period instruments, and historically-informed performance practices. The aim was to reconstruct and study the circumstances in which historic recordings were originally produced, in order that we might better understand what they reliably preserve of past performing musicians that are, nowadays, a rich source of inspiration for musicians of the present.

David Milsom, violin (Fernardo Solar González, 1976).

Inja Stanović, piano (Broadwood, c.1915).

Recorded at the University of Huddersfield and Stanović’s home studio, 2021.

Duncan Miller: Acoustic recording.

Adam Stanović: Digital recording and audio post-production.

Nicola Matić, Inja Stanović and Adam Stanović: Album design.

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This CD comprises Brahms’ op 120 viola sonatas, and the op. 108 violin sonata, performed on modern instruments, but acting as a creative interface between the relatively new research and performance field of ‘romantic’ string performing practices, and the use of modern instruments: a fusion, so to speak, between current ‘conservatoire normative’ practices, and avowedly ‘historically-informed’ ones. Dr Milsom is joined by his long-time chamber music partner, Jonathan Gooing, who is currently undertaking a PhD in historical chamber music performing practices at the University of Huddersfield. Whilst the works are very well-known, the manner of performance seeks to relax and modify a number of ‘modernist’ performance style elements, and is receptive to a range of nineteenth-century practices (such as some rhythmic freedom, piano arpeggiation, and string portamento) usually confined to much more specialist audiences and environments of scholarly research. This CD hopes to offer colourful and personal readings of these three seminal sonatas by Johannes Brahms.

Performed by: David Milsom; violin (Fernando Gonzalez Solar, 1976), viola (John Cockburn, 2012) and Jonathan Gooing; piano (Bösendorfer ‘Imperial’ fitted with Phoenix bridge agraffe system).

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