Kennedy Center Chamber Players: Spring Concert

Terrace Theater

Runtime

Approx. 110 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission
View Details

Program

Marissa Regni, violin
Ying Fu, violin
Daniel Foster, viola
David Hardy, cello
Lambert Orkis, piano

Johannes Brahms
(1833–1897)

Violin Sonata No.1 in G major, Op. 78
“Regensonate” (31’)

i. Vivace ma non troppo
ii. Adagio
iii. Allegro molto moderato

Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 (30’)

i. Allegro vivace
ii. Adagio affettuoso
iii. Allegro passionato
iv. Allegro molto

Intermission

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100 (21’)

i. Allegro amabile
ii. Andante tranquillo
iii. Allegretto grazioso

Viola Sonata No. 2 in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (23’)

i. Allegro amabile
ii. Allegro appassionato
iii. Andante con moto

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Meet the Artists

Program Notes

Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78

Brahms’ three violin sonatas are works of his fullest maturity. In 1853, he had written a scherzo for a collaborative sonata (Schumann and Albert Dietrich chipped in with the other movements) for Joseph Joachim, but during the following 27 years, he began and destroyed four further attempts in the genre. (Brahms was almost pathologically secretive about his sketches and unfinished works, virtually all of which he destroyed.) It was not until the G major Sonata (Op. 78) of 1879 that he was pleased enough with any of these violinistic progeny to admit one into the world; the Op. 100 Sonata followed in 1886 and Op. 108 came two years later. His reasons for concentrating on this form at the time may have been personal as well as musical—as each of these works was finished, he sent it as a sort of peace offering to Joseph Joachim, from whom he had been estranged for some time. Brahms, it seems, had sided with Joachim’s wife, the mezzo-soprano Amalie Weiss, in the couple’s divorce proceedings, and bitter feelings were incited between the old friends, though Joachim never wavered in his support and performance of Brahms’ music. The rift was not fully healed until Brahms offered Joachim the Double Concerto in 1887.

Brahms was inspired by his first trip to Italy, in the early months of 1878, to write his glowing and autumnal Piano Concerto in B-flat major. He returned to Goethe’s “land where the lemon trees grow” six times thereafter for creative inspiration and refreshment from the chilling Viennese winters. On his way back to Austria from Italy in May 1879, he stopped in the lovely village of Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in Carinthia, which he had haunted on his annual summer retreat the preceding year. “I only wanted to stay there for a day,” he wrote to his friend the surgeon Theodor Billroth, “and then, as this one day was so beautiful, for yet another. But each day was as fine as the last, and so I stayed on. If on your journeys you have interrupted your reading to gaze out of the window, you must have seen how all the mountains round the lake are white with snow, while the trees are covered with delicate green.” Brahms succumbed to the charms of the Carinthian countryside and abandoned all thought of returning immediately to Vienna—he remained in Pörtschach for the entire summer. It was in that halcyon setting that he composed his Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano.

Brahms had long been wary of the difficulty in combining the lyrical nature of the violin with the powerful chordal writing that he favored for piano, and it was only with the Klavierstücke, Op. 76, completed in 1878, that he developed a keyboard style lean enough to accommodate the violin as a partner. His other two violin sonatas followed within nine years. The First Sonata is a voluptuously songful and tenderly expressive testament to this important advance in Brahms’ creative development, the musical counterpart of his sylvan holiday at Pörtschach.

The Sonata is, throughout, warm and ingratiating, a touching lyrical poem for violin and piano. The main theme of the sonata-form first movement, sung immediately by the violin above the piano’s placid chords, is a gentle melody lightly kissed by the “Muse of the Viennese” waltz. Its opening dotted rhythm (long–short–long) is used as a motto that recurs not just in the first movement but later as well, a subtle but powerful means of unifying the entire work. The subsidiary theme, flowing and hymnal, is structured as a grand, rainbow-shaped phrase. The Adagio has a certain rhapsodic quality that belies its tightly controlled three-part form. The piano initiates the principal theme of the movement, which is soon adorned with little sighing phrases by the violin. The central section is more animated and recalls the dotted rhythm of the previous movement’s main theme; the principal theme returns in the violin’s double stops to round out the movement. Brahms wove two songs from his Op. 59 collection for voice and piano (1873) into the finale: Regenlied (“Rain Song”—this Sonata is sometimes referred to as the “Rain” Sonata) and Nachklang (“Reminiscence”). The movement is in rondo form, and, in its scherzando quality, recalls the finale of the B-flat Piano Concerto, written just a year before. Most of the movement (whose main theme begins with the familiar dotted rhythm) is couched in a romantic minor key (it turns brighter during one episode for a return of the theme from the second movement, played in double stops by the violin), but moves into a luminous major tonality for the coda.

Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 (1886)

For many years, Brahms followed the sensible practice of the Viennese gentry by abandoning the city when the weather got hot. He spent many happy summers in the hills and lakes of the Salzkammergut, east of Salzburg, but in 1886 his friend Joseph Widmann, a poet and librettist of considerable distinction, convinced Brahms to join him in the ancient Swiss town of Thun, 25 kilometers south of Bern in the foothills of the Bernese Alps. Brahms rented a flower-laden villa on the shore of Lake Thun in the nearby hamlet of Hofstetten and settled in for a long, comfortable summer. The periods away from Vienna were not merely times of relaxation for Brahms, however, but were actually working holidays. Some of his greatest scores (Violin Concerto; Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies; Piano Concerto No. 2; Haydn Variations; Tragic Overture, and many others) had been largely realized at his various summer retreats in earlier years. The three summers he spent at Thun (1886–1888) were equally productive: the Violin Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3, C minor Piano Trio, Second Cello Sonata, Gypsy Songs, Choral Songs (Op. 104), Lieder of Op. 105-107, and Double Concerto were all written there. Brahms composed the Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99, in Hofstetten during the summer of 1886; he gave the work an informal reading at Widmann’s house (along with the new Violin Sonata No. 2 and the C minor Trio) before returning to Vienna in the fall. Brahms gave the Sonata’s formal premiere on November 14, 1886 in Vienna with Robert Hausmann, cellist in the string quartet led by the composer’s long-time friend and musical ally, violinist Joseph Joachim.

The F major Cello Sonata, like many of the works from Brahms’ fullest maturity, is suffused with an autumnal glow that speaks of the composer’s satisfaction with his life at that time. “That Brahms was very happy in Hofstetten is evident from the works he composed there,” wrote William Murdoch. “He had finished his Fourth Symphony, and had led its premiere [on October 25, 1885 in Meiningen]. He was everywhere acclaimed, and his fame was world-wide. He had no more obstacles to overcome, and his works from now onward give that impression of security and certainty that can only be the outcome of a contented mind and a knowledge of mastery. Sadness and heartfelt emotion we shall find, but no longer that yearning after the unattainable that so often pervaded his earlier works.” The first edition of the F major Sonata, published by Simrock in 1887, noted that the piece is “for Piano and Violoncello,” an indication of the complete integration of the participants that marks Brahms’ greatest instrumental works.

The Sonata is in four expansive movements (Robert Schumann, in his 1853 article heralding the arrival of Brahms on the German musical scene, referred to his chamber compositions as “veiled symphonies”), whose expressive characters Florence May, the English pianist who studied with Brahms in the 1870s and eventually became his biographer, summarized thus: “the first broad and energetic; the second touching; the third passionate; the fourth vivacious.” Three ideas comprise the first movement’s exposition: the cello’s main theme, anticipatory in its leaping motion and snapping rhythms, is supported by the piano’s restless tremolos; the arching second subject is smoother in contour and gentler in expression; the agitated closing motive is urged on by strong repeated figurations. The development section is woven from all three themes, though its character is largely dominated by the restless tremolos that opened the movement. A full recapitulation and a coda based on the main theme provide formal balance for the movement. The second movement, “among the finest of the master’s Adagios” according to William Murdoch, follows a leisurely three-part form (A–B–A): the outer sections begin with a broad piano theme buoyed upon resonant pizzicato notes in the cello; the central episode is more animated and somewhat melancholy. The third movement is a scherzo whose impassioned mood is balanced by the sweetly flowing trio at its center. The finale-rondo, generally lightweight in character, is given emotional substance by the darkly colored passage that occupies its middle region.

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100 (1886)

The A major Violin Sonata is one of Brahms’ most limpidly beautiful creations. It has been nicknamed “Thun,” for the place of its composition, and “Meistersinger,” because of the resemblance of its opening motive to Walther’s “Prize Song” in Wagner’s opera, but the most appropriate appellation was suggested by Robert Schauffler: “Song.” Schauffler’s sobriquet not only notes the score’s richly lyrical nature but also recognizes Brahms’ use of several of his own songs as thematic material for the work: the first movement quotes Komm bald! (“Come Soon!,” Op. 97, No. 5) and Wie Melodien zieht es (“It Flows Like Melodies,” Op. 105, No. 1), while the finale recalls bits of Auf dem Kirchhofe (“In the Churchyard,” Op. 105, No. 4), Meine Lieder (“My Songs,” Op. 106, No. 4), and Meine Liebe ist grün (“My Love Is Evergreen,” Op. 63, No. 5), all of which were composed by the time of the Sonata and later gathered (except for Meine Liebe) into collections. So taken was Brahms’ friend Widmann with the sun-lit tenderness of this work that he was inspired by it to write a ballad that begins, “There, where the Aar [the river running past Thun] glides softly from the lake down to the little town which it washes, where many a noble tree spreads its shadow, I rolled deep in the long grass and slept, and dreamed through the bright summer day, dreams so delicious that I could hardly describe them....”

The published edition of the A major Sonata notes that it is “for Piano and Violin,” an indication of the complete integration of the participants that marks Brahms’ greatest instrumental works. The opening movement is a full sonata structure (the piano initiates both the principal and subsidiary themes), though it contains little of the dramatic catharsis often found in that form. This is rather music of comforting tranquility and warm sentiment that is as immediately accessible as any from Brahms’ later years. The Andante, with its episodes in alternating tempos, combines the functions of slow movement and scherzo, a structural modification Brahms had also tried in the F major String Quintet, Op. 88. (Brahms was not alone in this sort of formal experimentation. César Franck did a very similar thing in the second movement of his D minor Symphony, written just two years after this Sonata.) The finale confirms the pervasive lyricism of the entire work to such a degree that the composer’s correspondent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg was moved to say, “The whole Sonata is one caress.”

Viola Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (1894)

Among Brahms’ close friends and musical colleagues during his later years was the celebrated pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who played Brahms’ music widely and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court orchestra at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving at Meiningen, Bülow invited Brahms to be received by the music-loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and the composer was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised full dress for dinner.) At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor Clarinet Concerto by the orchestra’s principal player of that instrument, Richard Mühlfeld, and he was overwhelmed. So strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy, and the Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (Op. 114) and Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (Op. 115) were composed for Mühlfeld without difficulty between May and July 1891. Three years later Brahms produced the two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano (Op. 120) for Mühlfeld.

Though the E-flat Sonata was inspired by and conceived for the clarinet, its style and dark coloring also make it appropriate for the viola, and Brahms made an arrangement for that instrument that he instructed Simrock to publish as part of the music’s original issue. The autumnal opening movement follows the traditional sonata model. The first theme, suffused with cool sunlight, is an almost perfect example of melodic construction—rapturously lyrical in its initial phrases, growing more animated and wide-ranging as it progresses, and closing with a few short, quiet gestures. After a transition on the main subject followed by a brief moment of silence, the second theme, another gently flowing melodic inspiration, is introspectively intoned by the viola. The development section is compact and lyrical rather than prolix and dramatic, and leads to the balancing return of the earlier materials in the recapitulation. The Sonata’s greatest expressive urgency is contained in its second movement, a curious stylistic hybrid of folkish Austrian Ländler, sophisticated Viennese waltz, and Classical scherzo. The movement’s principal, minor-mode formal section flanks a brighter central chapter which Brahms marked forte ma dolce e ben cantando—“strong but sweet and well sung.” For the finale of this, his last chamber composition, Brahms employed one of his most beloved structural procedures, the variation. The theme is presented by the viola with two echoing phrases from the piano alone. This spacious melody is the subject of five variations, the last of which, a sturdy strain in a portentous minor key, is largely entrusted to the piano. An animated coda brings this splendid and deeply satisfying Sonata to its glowing conclusion.

Staff

The Trump Kennedy Center Executive Leadership

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Head Usher Randy Howes

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Program

Marissa Regni, violin
Ying Fu, violin
Daniel Foster, viola
David Hardy, cello
Lambert Orkis, piano

Johannes Brahms
(1833–1897)

Violin Sonata No.1 in G major, Op. 78
“Regensonate” (31’)

i. Vivace ma non troppo
ii. Adagio
iii. Allegro molto moderato

Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 (30’)

i. Allegro vivace
ii. Adagio affettuoso
iii. Allegro passionato
iv. Allegro molto

Intermission

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100 (21’)

i. Allegro amabile
ii. Andante tranquillo
iii. Allegretto grazioso

Viola Sonata No. 2 in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (23’)

i. Allegro amabile
ii. Allegro appassionato
iii. Andante con moto

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Kennedy Center Chamber Players: Spring Concert

Kennedy Center Chamber Players: Spring Concert

Sun. Mar. 16, 2025 2p.m.

Program

Terms and Conditions

Meet the Artists

Program Notes

Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78

Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 (1886)

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100 (1886)

Viola Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (1894)

Staff

The Trump Kennedy Center Executive Leadership

Staff for the Terrace Theater

Thank You to The Trump Kennedy Center Supporters

Program