Charismatic violinist Giovanni Guzzo makes his Champs Hill Records debut with an album of three well-loved sonatas, now very much in the mainstream of violin repertoire, but which arose from a turbulent period and a struggle for a national style in French and Belgian music.

Cesar Franck's Violin Sonata is, these days, in the repertoire of many great violinists, thanks to the Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe who was given it as a wedding present and premiered it in 1886. It is a superb synthesis of Franck's own uniquely rich harmonic language and thematic cyclicism and the Viennese Classical tradition that he came to hold so dear in the later stages of his career.

Gabriel Fauré's much-loved sonata was too radical for the conservative-minded music publishers of Paris in 1876, and he had to go to a German publisher instead. Saint-Saëns expressed his enthusiasm for this work by his friend and pupil: "In this sonata you can find everything to tempt a gourmet: new forms, excellent modulations, unusual tone colours, and the use of unexpected rhythms. And a magic floats above everything, encompassing the whole work, causing the crowd of usual listeners to accept the unimagined audacity as something quite normal. With this work Monsieur Fauré takes his place amongst the masters."

Where Fauré found writing for the violin easy, Francis Poulenc did not. He composed and destroyed two sonatas before completing this surviving sonata in 1942. “The monster is now ready. [The violin sonata] is not too bad, I believe, and in any case very different from the endless violin-melodic line sonatas written in France in the nineteenth century", he wrote.

Young violinist Giovanni Guzzo is rapidly rising as one of the leading performers of his generation. Born in Venezuela to parents of Italian and Venezuelan heritage, he is described as a wonderfully “magnetic” and “commanding” performer. He is the leader of the Manchester Camerata Orchestra and principal Guest leader of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Giovanni plays on a 1709 Antonio Stradivarius Violin.

Normandy-born pianist and composer Anne Lovett has been praised for her crystalline and beautiful tonal clarity and huge sonic power (an unusual combination), plus absolute virtuosity and a rare musical intelligence, expressiveness and ability to communicate. She studied at the Conservatoire Superieur de Paris with Pierre Reach (a pupil of the great Artur Rubinstein) and Alberto Neuman (a rare student of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli), with further studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Hamish Milne.