BEETHOVEN, BRAHMS & BRITTEN

1. Allegro nontroppo
2. Allegretto quasi Menuetto
3. Allegro

Brahms began his E minor Cello Sonata in the summer of 1862, but it was not until 1865 that he completed the work. The main themes of both the first and third movements allude to Bach’s Art of Fugue, but Brahms’s treatment of these ideas is firmly in the Romantic tradition. The first movement opens with the cello introducing the principal theme, accompanied by tentative piano chords played off the beat, before the same theme passes to the piano. The second group of themes ends with a particularly lyrical idea in B major that closes the exposition. A turbulent development section leads to a return of the main theme, this time accompanied by a melancholy falling motif in the piano as well as the off-beat chords. The coda brings the movement to a tranquil close in E major. Brahms originally wrote two central movements: the present Allegretto quasi Menuetto in A minor, and an Adagio which he abandoned. The Allegretto has a kind of folkish charm, as well as an ingenious Trio section derived from the same musical idea. The finale opens with the grandest of fugues, though the movement is broadly in sonata form. Whereas the first movement ended with a mood of consolation, the finale is dark, dramatic and intense to the end. The work was published in 1866 by Simrock (Brahms had sold him the sonata by telling him it was easy to play). The first public performance was given in Basel on 12 February 1867, by Moritz Kahnt and Hans von Bülow.  

© Nigel Simeone 2016 

1. Dialogo. Allegro
2. Scherzo–pizzicato. Allegretto
3. Elegia. Lento
4. Marcia. Ernergico5. Moto perpetuo. Presto

Britten sat next to Shostakovich at a concert in the Royal Festival Hall on 21 September 1960 – the occasion of the first British performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, played by Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was electrified by Rostropovich’s playing (Shostakovich later told Rostropovich that at the end of concert he was covered in bruises from being poked in the ribs by Britten: ‘As he liked so many things in the concerto, I am now suffering!’). Britten was delighted when Rostropovich asked him to write a piece for him. He planned the Sonata on a holiday in Greece and completed it in December 1960 and January 1961. Rostropovich and Britten gave the first performance on 7 July 1961 at the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh. In his programme note for the premiere, Britten wrote short descriptions of each movement. The first is ‘a discussion of a tiny motive of a rising or falling second. The motive is lengthened to make a lyrical second subject which rises and falls from a pizzicato harmonic.’ The demanding pizzicato second movement is ‘almost guitar-like in its elaborate right-hand technique’ while the third is ‘a long tune … developed by means of double, triple and quadruple stopping, to a big climax, and sinks away to a soft conclusion.’ The short march has the cello playing ‘a rumbustious bass to the jerky tune on the piano’, which returns after the central section ‘very softly, with the bass (now in the treble) in harmonics. The closing moto perpetuo includes an allusion to the D-S-C-H theme that Shostakovich used extensively in the Cello Concerto No. 1 – something Britten does not mention in his note, which describes the treatment of the dance-like theme as ‘now grumbling, now carefree’.

Nigel Simeone (C)

Allegro con brio
Adagio con molto sentimento d’affetto
Allegro – Allegro fugato

Beethoven’s last two cello sonatas were composed in 1815 dedicated to the Countess Anna Maria Erdödy. The initial critical response was one of bewilderment, one critic declaring that “these two sonatas are definitely among the strangest and most unusual works … ever written for the pianoforte. Everything about them is completely different from anything else we have heard, even by this composer.” Indeed, the D major Cello Sonata Op.102 No.2 is a work that points forward to some of Beethoven’s final instrumental works – the late piano sonatas and quartets – in significant ways. The Beethoven scholar William Kinderman has suggested that the solemnity and austerity of the slow movement (in D minor) has pre-echoes of the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ from the Quartet Op.132, while fugal finale is the one of a series of such movements in Beethoven’s late instrumental pieces (followed by the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and the Grosse Fuge among others). The whole sonata, from the brusque opening of its first movement, to the extraordinary culmination of the fugue, is characterized by wild emotional contrasts: the stern, profoundly serious Adagio is flanked by two faster movements that are dominated by a fiery, even angry, dialogue between the two instruments.

Nigel Simeone © 2012