Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, born in 1757 in Ruppersthal in Lower Austria, belongs like Fiorillo among the contemporaries of Mozart and Haydn. He received his first lessons from Johann Baptist Vanhal in Vienna; at fifteen, through the offices of Count Erdody, who also bore the costs, he became a pupil of Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt. With Haydn, the acknowledged master of the string quartet, his strong turn towards chamber music developed. In 1777 Erdody appointed him Kapellmeister of his small ensemble of virtuosos; in 1789 he took up the post of minster Kapellmeister in Strasbourg, and in 1795 he moved to Paris, where two years later he secured his living by founding a music publishing house and a piano firm that exists to this day. In 1784 Mozart wrote to his father about Pleyel’s quartets that they were very well written and very agreeable, hoping that Pleyel would one day be able to replace Haydn.
In the Duo in C minor Op. 30 No. 3 the Italian influence is unmistakable. The galant style of the Andante shows itself in numerous arpeggiations and carefully phrased melodic turns; the frequent double stops in both instruments at times suspend the character of two-part writing. The following Allegro espressivo reveals Pleyel’s inclination to ornament with passage work, thematic quotations and figurations are distributed evenly between the instruments, and a varied dynamic range from a tender piano to abrupt chord progressions places the movement in a field of tension between lyrical and dramatic elements. The Tempo di Minuetto is clearly ternary, its A section song-like in contrast to the virtuoso execution of the B section; the coda with ascending semiquaver figures provides an effective close.
Very little is known of Federigo Fiorillo’s life. The son of the Naples-born conductor and composer Ignazio Fiorillo, he quickly made a name as a virtuoso on the mandolin and the violin and gained international recognition. After a period as conductor at the theatre in Riga he joined the Salomon Quartet in London in 1788 as its violist and settled there until, in 1815, he resumed the life of a travelling virtuoso; in 1823 he returned to London, and his year of death is unknown. His Duo in C major Op. 31 No. 1 shows an elegant style and a compositional mastery that can well be measured against the demands of pure two-part writing for related instruments across a relatively long piece. He dispenses with full harmony by means of double stops; the tension of the work comes from the masterly treatment of his own instrument, and the often literal transfer of ideas from violin to cello gives the latter an equally virtuoso role.
Jean Sibelius, born on 8 December 1865 in Hämeenlinna in southern Finland, received violin lessons only from the age of fourteen; in 1885 he enrolled to study law at the University of Helsinki and moved to the music academy a year later. Of his youthful works he released, after long hesitation, only one string quartet; in 1982 the family gave the manuscripts still in their possession to the University of Helsinki, where it was recognised what treasures the collection held and what a picture it gives of the young composer’s development. According to the autograph the Canon was written on 13 June 1889 — a short Tempo di Minuetto he probably wrote for himself and his brother Christian, who was a cellist, laid out as a strictly maintained canon at two bars’ distance. Even if Sibelius regarded it merely as a compositional finger exercise, he achieved a charming piece that exploits the sonic possibilities of the cello.
Reinhold Glière’s Eight Duos Op. 39 were written in 1909 and place the scoring in a late Romantic context: Prelude, Gavotte, Cradle Song, Canzonetta, Intermezzo, Impromptu, Scherzo and Étude — eight terse character pieces of one to three minutes each, which round off the programme. The recording was made from 26 to 28 December 2000 in the Stadthalle Rheinberg; the CD runs to 47:34 and the booklet has 32 pages in German and English.