To his earlier piece, he added a virtuosic ‘Capriccio’ movement to create his Sonata. Years later, when teaching at the Academy, Ligeti met a better-established cellist, Vera Dénes, who asked him to write a piece for her. Virány, unaware of his feelings, accepted his gift but never played it. ‘Dialogo’ was written for fellow student and cellist Annuss Virány, with whom he was secretly in love.
Ligeti composed the two movements of what became his Cello Sonata, ‘Dialogo’ and ‘Capriccio’, respectively in 1948, while he was still a student, and in 1953 when he was a teacher at the Academy.
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Not only was he Kodály’s pupil at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, but he also owed his first professional position at that institution to the great Hungarian composer, who secured that post for him in 1950, a year after Ligeti’s graduation (Ligeti having in the meantime spent a year researching Hungarian folk music in Transylvania). In this respect, Kodály directly inspired such works as Khachaturian’s Sonata-Fantasy, and – to an extent – his pupil Ligeti’s early yet masterful Solo Cello Sonata, which appears first on the programme. Ligeti could hardly avoid the example of his former teacher’s work. Among the achievements of his own magnificent Solo Cello Sonata of 1915 is the way it elaborates on Bach’s use of folk music (each of Bach’s suites ending with a rustic gigue). Kodály was the first to take up Bach’s gauntlet. It is within that legacy that the works on this programme were created. What Casals so eloquently demonstrated in performing Bach’s Suites, though, was that the cello could truly speak entirely in its own right, with no support from orchestra or any other instrument. The cello’s singing qualities had already been revealed by a previous generation of cellists – most notably the musician Tchaikovsky called ‘the tsar of cellists’, Karl Davydov (1838–1889), whose pupils Hanuš Wihan and Carl Fuchs in turn inspired such great masterpieces as the concertos of Dvorák and Elgar (the latter’s being the work that first inspired Jonathan Swensen to take up the cello) and then there’s the great Bohemian cellist David Popper (1843–1913), whose pupils included Jenö Kerpely, for whom Kodály wrote his Solo Cello Sonata. The cello as an impassioned solo voice dates back at least to the six cello suites composed by JS Bach in the early decades of the 18th century – or, perhaps more precisely, as they were first widely revived and propagated early in the 20th century by the great Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals (1876–1973). He also performs at festivals in Denmark and further afield, including the Tivoli Festival, the Copenhagen Summer Festival, the Hindsgavl Summer Festival and the Usedomer Musikfestival. Swensen has performed with orchestras including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, and Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música. In his native Denmark, Swensen was also a recipient of the Musikanmelderringens Artist Prize in 2020, the Jacob Gades Scholarship in 2019, the Léonie Sonning Talent Prize in 2017 and the first prize winner at the Danish String Competition in 2016. He is the recipient of the 2022 Avery Fisher Career Grant and also the winner of the 2018 Khachaturian International Cello Competition.
Swensen won the 2019 Windsor Festival International String Competition, his prize for winning included the recording of this brilliant debut album as part of the Windsor Festival's ongoing relationship with Champs Hill Records. Works that stand the test of time do so because they will always remain fresh to interpretation, and the moment they are played, they become once again fresh, something that is happening right now, a story in need of being told in a different way which we haven't heard yet. In my opinion, this is what makes music amazing. The fact that it was written many years ago does not change that the music is happening now, in this moment, when the audience hears it. It is only when I am playing that I truly feel music. Swensen comments: "My goal with this album was to create the illusion that the music was being played for the first time: a fresh take, what one might call a 'creation of sound in the moment'.
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Alongside the Kodály sonata sits the seldom-heard Khachaturian Sonata-Fantasie for Solo Cello, plus a newly commissioned work by Danish composer Bent Sørensen, Farewell-Fantasia. Jonathan Swensen offers a fresh take on lesser-known works for solo cello for his stunning debut album, Fantasia.
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