Symphony for Two: Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello Puts Duos to the Test

By Laurence Vittes | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings

Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello was written between 1920 and 1922 in the wake of Claude Debussy’s death and the end of the First World War. It gives a deep look into the composer’s inner world and represents a significant turning point in his musical development. It also requires virtuosos at the top of their game who have committed themselves to what program notes writer Lucy Miller Murray describes as “minimalism before its time.” Indeed, performing the Sonata requires a very 21st-century synchronized combination of precision, speed, and absolute fidelity to the score. 

Ravel designated this piece a “truly symphonic work for two instruments,” and a bon mot circulated among his friends that he should one day write a “reduction of his Sonata for large orchestra.” Ravel referred to it with exasperation as “ce bougre,” a French idiom evoking the two hard and splendid years it cost him to write it.

The piece is cast in four movements: A disorienting Allegro where the two lines blur and take off on long-arc tangents studded with harmonics, a biting Très vif Scherzo laced with casually impossible technical difficulties, a somber Lent with the Hungarian-inflected modes of an austere chorale, and a vigorous Vif, avec entrain Finale that culminates in a contrapuntal blaze apparently inspired by Mozart.

Among its earliest champions were Joseph Szigeti and Gregor Piatigorsky who played the Sonata in Berlin and Frankfurt in 1931. But it didn’t immediately catch on, and Piatigorsky would never play it with Heifetz. Even Mstislav Rostropovich, who played everything, never heard it until 1970. That has since changed: The piece is now performed and recorded regularly.

In recent years, Ravel’s Sonata has drawn many of today’s most adventurous performers. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell played it at the Park Avenue Armory in 2017 amid works by Scelsi, Xenakis, and Machaut. In 2020, after performing Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony, Kopatchinskaja played the second movement of the Sonata as an encore with principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil. Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras performed it in Barcelona in 2022. This year, Steven Isserlis and Irène Duval played it in Sheffield, and Alexandra Conunova and Brannon Cho opened Beatrice Rana’s Classiche Forme chamber music festival in Lecce with it.

Ravel’s Sonata has been recorded more than 40 times, beginning in 1940 with a version by Eudice Shapiro and Victor Gottlieb in New York for Victor—though it was never issued. The first widely available recording came in 1948 from Oscar Shumsky and Bernard Greenhouse. Since 2020, a new generation has taken it up, including Luka and Léo Ispir, protégés of Renaud and Gautier Capuçon; the Ensemble Sésame and Trio Dali; Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta on their Sol & Pat album; a laser-focused Susanna Yoko Henkel and Monika Leskovar; and Nicolas Altstaedt and Pekka Kuusisto, who paired it with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto. 

Playing the Sonata

The technical difficulties in the Sonata are almost incomprehensible to non-string players. The first movement, though more transparent to the ear, is filled with rhythmic traps and tangled textures that constantly challenge ensemble unity. But it’s in the second movement that the difficulties leap into the foreground. Within the first 30 seconds, the two players must coordinate pizzicatos in harmonic patterns that only make sense when played very fast and perfectly in sync—followed immediately by a five-second violin outburst in double-stops that is almost never executed flawlessly, even on recordings. And that’s just one of myriad such passages. Making music out of this mechanistic universe is where the real work begins—and where
Ravel’s genius truly emerges.

Luka Ispir laughs when I ask for tips on rehearsing the Sonata. “It’s hard to say. Léo and I worked on it for almost two years. It is so difficult to play that violinists and cellists argue who has the hardest part. We worked with many teachers on this piece and have played it a lot. But we still prefer to rehearse by starting extremely slowly, feeling how the music gathers together, then slowly, slowly bringing the tempo up as close as possible to the actual speed.”

Christian Poltéra, who supplied fingerings for the Henle urtext edition published in 2013, agrees: “It’s a very tricky piece! Cellists at even the highest levels struggle with it, including myself.” Detailing his main goals as “bringing out the text and structure as clearly as possible,” Poltéra often rehearses the Sonata at 80 percent of the tempo, paying attention to multiple things simultaneously: rhythm, intonation, clarity of overlapping motives, and articulation.

When I ask Poltéra whether it is possible to infuse the music with authentic bon goût Français under such extreme circumstances, he tells me that Ravel is very precise in his markings. “Unlike Brahms, Ravel rarely gives you a few bars you can just play conventionally. Instead, it’s a string of untypical cellistic tasks. But if you follow his markings—et voilà—hopefully it will sound a bit like what you think of as French.”

The Trio Dali’s cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca says that a sound world à la française, particularly in impressionistic music, has a lot to do with a combination of bow speed and vibrato. “Try to achieve an aerial sound, where you sustain notes only on important harmonic points, and according to Ravel’s precise indications. Of course this is related to the structure of the piece, how it moves, and even more about the phrases you need to shape. I’m trying to look for a good balance between transparency in general and sound focus in the string.”

For both the player and the listener, the ultimate question is of meaning. The Ensemble Sésame’s cellist Maitane Sebastián describes the Sonata as “one of Ravel’s most elusive monuments, but also one of his richest and most extraordinary, and with language so spare that it bares his soul. We have tried to embrace the immense precision of the text, taking care to let every detail be heard, and to avoid falling into the trap of a certain gratuitous brutality that the harshness of the harmony and contrapuntal audacity might seem to inspire. The rhythmic complexity, too, and the dense discourse for just two instruments make this a technically daunting work which, once surmounted, reveals the innocence of a dreamy, sensitive child.”

In 1945 Hélène Jourdan-Morhange in Ravel et nous reminisced about her rehearsals with Maurice Maréchal attended by Ravel in preparation for the first performance. Precision again was the key. Ravel set great store by having the pizzicati in the violin and cello at the beginning of the Scherzo played absolutely rhythmically and perfectly synchronized, she said, so that there would be no break in the overall line. As for the last movement’s theme, he said the bow should spring “like a mechanical rabbit.”

Editions 

Both Bärenreiter and Henle published urtext editions in 2013 (the Bärenreiter edited by Douglas Woodfull-Harris, the Henle by Ulrich Krämer). Taken together, they offer a glimpse of how Ravel must have heard the work in rehearsals. As such, they are documents of early-20th-century performance practice. Bärenreiter’s includes the original fingerings by the performers not found in the first edition, and Henle’s includes the fingerings by Zimmermann and Poltéra. In 2019, International Music Company published the Sonata edited by June DeForest and Daniel Morganstern of the American Chamber Trio, which had added the piece to its repertoire after hearing the Shumsky/Greenhouse recording. The edition has the duo’s “practical time-tested fingerings.” And, of course, there is also the original Durand edition from 1922. —LV