Pardon the pun, but here is two-thirds of an A-list ensemble, playing three A-list sonatas for violin and piano, all three of which happen to be in the key of A/a. While I wasn’t able to find the date of The Lillibridge Ensemble’s founding, its founding member is no secret. It’s pianist Madeleine Forte, who, when the works in this album were recorded in concert—the Franck in 2023, Schumann in 2025, Fauré in 2026—Madeleine was in her 87th year and still going strong.

The Lillibridge Ensemble, based in Connecticut, is actually a piano trio, with husband-and-wife team Raphael Ryger, violin, and Karen Ryger, cello joining Madeleine in works that call for all three instruments. These being duo sonatas, Karen Ryger sits this recording out. The Roméo Records release marks what appears to be the Fanfare debut of these players as a named ensemble, but Madeleine, especially, has a fairly large presence in the magazine as a solo pianist—she studied with Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff—with a special focus on Chopin and the piano music of the French Impressionists, namely Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen. But make no mistake; she’s no stranger to Beethoven and Schubert, as well as to other familiar composers, such as Bartók and Liszt.

I find no listings in the Fanfare Archive, however, for either of the Rygers, so it’s assumed that this is violinist Raphael Ryger’s first appearance in the magazine.

From what I understand, Madeleine’s previous recordings have been made in smaller venues that are ideally suited to solo recitals and chamber music concerts, and some—not all of them—exist primarily in the digital domain, as I believe is the case with this one, as it’s listed on Roméo’s website as a “digital only release.”

Madeleine comes with a most impressive résumé beyond her studies with Cortot and Kempff. She holds multiple diplomas from the École Normale de Musique de Paris, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Rosina Lhévinne and Martin Canin. In 1976, she became a naturalized American citizen, in 1984, she received a Ph.D. degree from New York University with a dissertation on the music of Olivier Messiaen, and in 1996, she was a Yale University Visiting Hendon Fellow.

Forte’s online biography indicates that her discography, beyond that of her digital-only format recordings, does include physical CDs of music by Albéniz, Arensky, Barber, Bartók, Beethoven, Bizet, Busoni, Chabrier, Chopin, Debussy, Falla, Glière, Khachaturian, Liszt, Manuel Infante, Messiaen, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns—almost exclusively on the Roméo label, but on one or two other labels as well.

Since 1988, violinist Raphael Ryger has served as concertmaster for O.N.E, the Orchestra of New England, which calls New Haven home. The orchestra is a small group, ranging in numbers from an HIP-sized ensemble of as few as 10 players, to a medium-sized chamber orchestra comprised of 38 members, depending on the called-for instruments of the works being performed. In any given season, the group’s website informs us, 20-percent of the players are non-permanent members, most of whom are professional musicians who once played in well-established orchestras and are now teaching in nearby colleges and universities or are engaged in other musical and non-musical pursuits. Raphael Ryger, for example, in addition to his first-chair position in O.N.E. and his solo concertizing in the area, is a developer of artificial intelligence software for Clarivate Analytics. We won’t ask if his playing in these three sonatas is AI-generated, though that day isn’t far in the offing, if it’s not here already.

Raphael and wife-to-be Karen met as students at Juilliard and were mentored in a chamber music workshop by the renowned Budapest Quartet. Together they have since studied and performed with ensembles both in Israel and in the U.S. Raphael has been concertmaster and soloist with orchestras in Israel and in Connecticut, while Karen was previously a member of the Jerusalem String Quartet, the Jerusalem Symphony, and the Israel Chamber Orchestra. As a cellist, she, unfortunately, is not a participant in these recordings of duo sonatas for violin and piano.

Schumann is the odd fellow out, so to speak, in this triptych of sonatas. And if he’d been familiar with the turn of phrase that “firsts are like pancakes; they’re always flops,” he’d probably have referenced it to describe his own Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Minor. He did, however, express a very similar sentiment when he said that he didn’t like the way it turned out, so he wrote a second one, and later, a third one, which usually receives little attention because it’s not entirely a newly composed work.

Schumann’s judgment of his own crêpier talents may not have been as keen as his instincts were when it came to judging the works of other composers; for relatively speaking, it was his second pancake that came out floppier than the first. That’s mostly an unsubstantiated comparative statement based solely on numbers of recordings, a popularity contest in which the No. 1 seems to be in the lead, though it’s a close call because most recordings of the A-Minor Sonata include the No. 2 and often even all three sonatas on a single disc.

AI, however, which Raphael Ryger is sure to appreciate, agrees that “Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, op. 105, is generally more popular and frequently recorded than No. 2, often cited as a more accessible, concise, and emotionally direct work. While No. 1 is lauded for its concise, passionate, and ‘gloomy’ character, Sonata No. 2 in D minor, op. 121, is often described as more grand, structurally complex, and ‘Schumannesque’.” So, there you have it, the conclusion from the unlimited electronic brain of the AI chips and supercomputers that sweep the universe clean of all matter, whether it matters or not.

In a long-ago review published in issue 30:6, I singled out a new Çedille recording of Schumann’s three violin sonatas performed by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Reiko Uchida as the best I’d encountered up to that point, and a must-have for all chamber music lovers. Ryger and Forte now offer serious competition in Schumann’s A-Minor Sonata. Ryger plays with a throbbing passion that is more intense and heated than Koh’s rather more reserved and introspective reading. Make no mistake, Koh is not withdrawn or emotionally detached, but she does tend to reign in some of Schumann’s more effusive Romantic outpourings, whereas Ryger gives them full vent.

His and Forte’s performance, however, is not one that lacks control or careful consideration of how best to balance the conversation between the two instruments. One has the feeling that this is a reading in which exquisite detail emerges from a well-rehearsed, consensually agreed-upon plan by two artists who have taken into account every aspect of the score, from tempos to dynamics, phrasing, tone production, and textural weighting to match the music’s evolving moods. It’s as if nothing is left to chance, and yet it sounds completely natural and spontaneous, and that’s a direct result of the caliber of artistry we’re dealing with here.

On the Belgian/French side of the border, we have two equally ravishing performances of Franck’s one and only deservedly famous Violin Sonata in A Major, and the very beautiful A-Major Sonata by Fauré, his No. 1 and by no means a pancake.

Franck’s 1886 violin sonata is indisputably, in my opinion, the most important violin sonata to come out of the Belgian/French violin school of the late Romantic period. I’ve discussed at length in prior reviews the novelty of the composer’s treatment of cyclic form in this particular work, so I won’t recap yet again the process of coalescence to which Franck subjects his theme. The piece may well be not just the most important violin sonata of its time and place; arguably it may also be Franck’s greatest work.

Here the competition is much stiffer than it is in either the Schumann or Fauré sonatas. The “name” violinists who haven’t recorded the Franck are few and far between. Though not a recent recording, I’ve long held in special favor the performance by Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires on a DG release. It doesn’t look like that album was ever reviewed in Fanfare, but Dumay’s later recording with Louis Lortie on Onyx received several very favorable reviews.

I’m not prepared to say that it takes a French violinist to capture the overt sensuality that’s at the heart of the Franck, but it doesn’t hurt. Ryger and Forte’s tempo for the first movement strikes me as a bit on the slow side, but it’s overcome by the violinist’s suggestive, insinuating phrasing which is precisely what’s needed. The piano carries the main burden in the second movement, and Forte manages to bring a good deal of gravitas to the thundering roulades, while maintaining textural transparency, a neat trick that not all players succeed at as well as Madeleine does.

Eagerly, I await the breath-taking passage in the third movement, where the outlines of the cyclic theme finally begin to emerge clearly in the sustained violin melody over the flowing arpeggios in the piano. I don’t know why, but this is where in so many performances of the piece, the violinist and pianist get out of rhythmic sync—i.e., the ends of the violin’s phrases don’t quite coincide with the piano’s cadential harmonic resolutions on the downbeats. The reader may be assured that this does not happen in this performance by Ryger and Forte. Coordination is perfect.

Is there anything in music more heartwarming than hearing the melody in its unmasked fullness for the first time as the finale opens to reveal what the whole sonata has been about from the beginning? Gorgeous!

Some composers were great at ending their works. Others were great at beginning them. And still others, who were not great at either, would have had no need for endings if they’d abstained from beginnings in the first place.

I’m not sure I can speak to Fauré’s endings, but his beginnings, more often than not, are of the truly memorable variety, and the opening to his Violin Sonata No. 1 is one of them. Its cascading piano part and melodic line in the violin, with its unexpected harmonic progressions, convey a feeling of surging, soaring flight. And you don’t have to listen very hard to hear how the beginning thematic motifs permeate and suffuse the entire first movement with light.

It’s sometimes said that Fauré was a link between late Brahms, especially in his late solo piano pieces, and the French Impressionists. Aaron Copland referred to Fauré as “the Brahms of France.” One senses that more perhaps in the French composer’s mastery of formal structuring and motivic development of his thematic material than necessarily in the character, style, or content of his music. I’d be almost equally inclined to name Saint-Saëns as a potential link to the late German Romantic school of Brahms and his admirers and wannabees.

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. If you’re looking for the sublimation of eroticism and carnal desire, which is not infrequently cited as a character trait of the fin de siècle French Romantic and Impressionist schools, this sonata by Fauré is not it. It may be a bit more subdued in that department than Franck can be, but not by much. This is still very suggestive and seductive music with only a thin veil of chasteness opaquing the underlying heaving and thrusting. Where Franck is an eager and active participant in the orgy, Fauré is perhaps more akin to the voyeur.

The balance between the sensual and the sensuous in Fauré’s music is a delicate one, and Raphael Ryger and Madeleine Forte perform that delicate dance in just the right proportions to make this one of the most beautiful and compelling performances of the Fauré sonata I can recall ever hearing.

Everything about this release—the program, the playing, and the superb recording—make this release a winner in all three categories.

Jerry Dubins

Five stars: A top contender for the gold in programming, playing, and recording.