Albert Sammons (violin)
William Murdoch (pianoforte)
Dohnanyi, director of the Budapest Conservatoire since 1919, is hardly a Hungarian nationalist composer as Bartok and Kodaly are. He has not been entirely insensitive to the national folk idiom, but if he must be given a label, the label should bear the words ' post-Brahmsian romanticist '. The first movement of this fine Sonata (published in 1913) is noticeably Brahmsian.
The second movement is in a form of which Dohnanyi has always been fond: a scherzo laid out in variations. This scherzo harks back in one place to the first movement ; the C sharp-D sharp-E motto of the first movement opens the finale ; and the end of the finale also harks back to the beginning of the first movement. But the Sonata as a whole is a spiritual unity which could easily have dispensed with such devices to clamp it together.