Spanish Violin Sonatas

Violin Sonatas: Allú, Adalid, Morphy brings three long-hidden 19th-century Spanish violin sonatas to public attention for the first time on disc. Violinist David Santacecilia and pianist Alberto Urroz uncover a chapter of Spanish chamber music history overshadowed for generations by the operatic tastes of the era and the Central European “música sabia” canon that followed it.

The program traces a fascinating lineage: Martín Sánchez Allú’s Sonata in D major (dedicated to violinist Jesús de Monasterio in 1854) shows the lightest Beethovenian imprint of the three, leaning instead toward Haydn, Mozart, and the harmonic language of Spohr and Field. Marcial del Adalid’s Sonata in C minor, composed by a Galician aristocrat whose family owned one of Spain’s finest musical libraries, wears its debt to Beethoven’s minor-key pathos openly while gesturing toward Schubert and Mendelssohn. Guillermo Morphy’s Sonata in E flat major, premiered in Paris in 1869 before an audience that included the exiled Queen Isabella II, closes the set with an explicitly Beethovenian chamber conception recalling the “Spring” Sonata.

Recorded at the Auditorio Manuel de Falla in Granada, this release restores three substantial, skillfully argued works to the standard violin-piano repertoire — and makes the case that Spain’s “música sabia” was very much alive.

David Santacecilia – violin
Alberto Urroz – piano