Duo brings drama to sonatas

Partway through his recital of Mozart and Schubert violin sonatas with Andrew Manze in the Doheny Mansion at Mount St. Mary’s College on Wednesday night, Richard Egarr stopped to describe his fortepiano. Sitting under the over-the-top Tiffany glass dome of the Pompeian Room and surrounded by a historical mishmash of paintings, antique furniture and figurines, the British pianist spoke of smooth and crunchy peanut butter.

“The black monster” (a modern concert grand) is for those who like theirs creamy, he suggested, since the sound is meant to be as homogenized as possible from low notes to high. The London-made 1829 Broadwood at which Egarr was seated has the shape of a modern piano -- if slighter and prettier with its weather-beaten brown wood -- but is all crunch.

The piano was discovered a decade ago in a barn in Northern California and carefully restored, and its sound seems to reflect a record of its long life. The gong-like lower range, the mellower middle notes and the slightly clattery but bell-like top all have distinct characters.

So what about Manze’s violin, which was French and made four years later? To take Egarr’s metaphor a step further, Manze’s gut-string fiddle might be described as having a pungent goat’s milk quality, rather than the homogenized cow’s milk nature of a modern instrument.

And why stop there? I’m told a sandwich popularized during the Great Depression in Savannah, Ga., is peanut butter and onion. The onion has to have some sweetness in it, and the strong mix of flavors is clearly not for everyone. But a bite certainly gets your attention.

That is sort of the treatment Manze and Egarr gave Mozart and Schubert. Popular as these composers’ chamber music is, their violin sonatas are not overexposed. Peacocky violinists object that Mozart treats the piano so prominently. Schubert’s four violin sonatas are early works not quite so sublime as some of his later chamber pieces, although they hardly lack marvels.

In truth, the sonatas played on modern instruments in a stuffy large hall can seem a tad bland. The performances heard in a salon setting for this program in the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series were rough and ready and full of immediate conflict and drama. Adding to the tension was that Egarr had encountered the piano only two hours before the performance. It has its quirks, he noted. And to meet the Broadwood’s engagingly gawky big sound, Manze made a last-minute switch from the older violin he had intended to use.

Manze and Egarr took an almost symphonic approach to Mozart, and their Schubert was big-boned as well. Some of this may have had to do with the fact that these longtime partners have become increasingly prominent as conductors, leading British early-music bands. Working up the historical food chain, Manze now is music director of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden (in April, he will conduct Beethoven’s “Eroica” with the ensemble at the Orange County Performing Artscenter).

Conducting also appears to have taken time away from Manze’s violin playing; his intonation sometimes suffered Wednesday. But he also sometimes seemed to suffer intonation intentionally, emphasizing dissonances for expressive, operatic effect.

Egarr could be lyrical and eloquent, as he was in the slow movements of Mozart’s F Major (K. 376) and B-flat Major (K. 454) sonatas or in his lovely accompaniment to the opening of Schubert’s A Major “Duo” (D. 574), aided by a soft pedal that really did soften the sound into cushiony cotton. But, like Manze, he came to life when he could vividly dig into power chords. In Mozart’s later sonata, both players went on a hell-bent-for-leather tear at the end.

Pleasing Viennese pastries were served afterward. No peanut butter and onion for this civilized crowd in this opulent palace. But for two hours, Mozart and Schubert were rarely sweet and seldom polite. They were as they had been in Vienna in the 18th and 19th centuries -- real, not porcelain, beings, warts and all.

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mark.swed@latimes.com