Paul Juon was born in Moscow, of Swiss parents, in 1872, studying there with Arensky and Taneyev; Rachmaninov, a fellow student, dubbed him ‘the Russian Brahms’. At the Hochschule der Musik in Berlin, Woldemar Bargiel, Clara Schumann’s half-brother, was his main teacher before Juon himself became a respected member of the staff. There are indeed echoes of Brahms in Juon’s early music but there is also a fondness for Russian folksong and a mastery of counterpoint, which all feed into his urgent, late-Romantic lyricism.

REVIEW

Paul Juon...studied with Woldemar Bargiel in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik. These influences developed him into a hothouse for late-Romantic lyricism and, on this showing, a skilled purveyor of channelled sentimentality.

The sound here is right upfront to the listener...The musicians play right to your heart.

Of the two tightly-timed viola sonatas, the D major, Op. 15 work is from the turn of the 19^th and twentieth centuries. It overflows with torrential Brahmsian high romance, rather in the style of the Brahms Double Concerto. There’s no question of a temperate or distanced approach here and the musicians are at one with that mind-set; they constantly ‘push’ the mood and the tempo to intensify rather than in impatience with it. Listen to them in the finale. The Second Viola Sonata Op. 82a is from 1924. Its Moderato assai is a shade cooler but soulful and does not disappoint. On this disc it is the viola sonatas, with their robust and memorable themes and treatment, that will have the listener sitting bolt-upright.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)