The following are Program Notes for the Distinguished Artists in Recital with the mother-son duo of violinist Miriam Fried and pianist Jonathan Biss at the 92nd Street Y on May 14. Distinguished Artists in Recital series subscriptions for the 2008-09 season featuring Pinchas Zukerman, Marc Neikrug, Nikolaj Znaider, musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Saleem Abboud Ashkar, Heinz Hollinger and members of the Zehetmair Quartet are now on sale.

BRAHMS: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in A Major, Op. 100
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897. He wrote the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in 1886.

Composed between 1879 and 1888, Brahms’ three sonatas for violin and piano are works of mature and unostentatious mastery. In contrast to the Violin Concerto of 1878, which sets the soloist’s warm-blooded virtuosity against the resplendent panoply of the orchestra, the sonatas are predominantly intimate and conversational in tone. The muscular lyricism that characterized much of Brahms’ earlier chamber music has receded into the background. In its place is a more restrained, but no less compelling, mixture of tenderness and strength.

Both the sonatas and the concerto reflect the influence of the great Hungarian violinist and composer Joseph Joachim. Brahms’ long-time ensemble partner and artistic collaborator, Joachim first heard Brahms play the piano on a recital with the violinist Eduard Reményi in 1853. “Never in the course of my artistic life,” he recalled, “have I been more completely overwhelmed with delighted surprise than when the rather shy-mannered, blond companion of my countryman played one of his sonata movements of quite undreamed-of originality and power, looking noble and inspired the while.” Even at that early date, Joachim was as impressed by Brahms’ tenderness and “idealism” as by his forceful artistic personality.

The first movement of the Sonata No. 2 in A Major—marked, rather unusually, Allegro amabile—exudes the relaxed give-and-take of a companionable dialogue. The pianist introduces a lilting four-bar melody, whereupon the violinist echoes the final phrase, as if to say, encouragingly, “Yes, go on.” After two or three more false starts, the violin picks up the theme and runs with it. From then on the two instruments pass the ball back and forth, now lightheartedly, now in earnest, always careful to avoid upstaging each other. The genial repartee continues in the Andante tranquillo, with slow and quick sections alternating in rondo-like ABABA form. The main theme of the concluding Allegretto grazioso, like that of the first movement, surges upward in rising arcs before returning to rest at its starting point.

BARTÓK: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, BB 85
Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania, in 1881 and died in New York City in 1945. He wrote the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in 1922.

Bartók acknowledged his indebtedness to Brahms as a master of traditional musical forms and their variations. It is not the German composer’s conservatively classical spirit, however, but the radical modernism of Debussy that is evoked most powerfully in Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 2. Debussy’s innovative formal structures and exotic, impressionistic harmonies made a deep impression on the younger composer. In particular, Debussy’s Violin Sonata of 1917, with its lacy arabesques of melody silhouetted against the piano’s lapidary chords, anticipates the boldly modernist and highly individualized musical language that Bartók was creating in the early 1920s.

For the average listener, the Violin Sonata No. 2 is undoubtedly one of Bartók’s most challenging works. The Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola defended the Hungarian’s stylistic iconoclasm, observing admiringly that Bartók “was born difficult.” On the other hand, the British critic Richard Cappell was so incensed by the sonata’s London premiere in 1923 that he titled his scathing review, “Mr. Bartók’s Bombardment.” Both men had a point. Bartok’s tightly packed tone clusters, feverish rhythms, slashing dissonances and sharp contrasts of dynamics, registers and sonorities do indeed assault the senses. Once the initial shock wears off, however, the ear quickly becomes attuned to the music’s dense and spiky lyricism.

The sonata comprises two movements, instead of the usual three or four. The first, marked Molto moderato, is languid and rhapsodic; the second, Allegretto, dance-like and propulsive. Although the violin and piano share motivic material, much of the time they seem to inhabit different worlds. The work opens with a subterranean F-sharp in the piano anchoring the violin’s repeated high E. It closes some 20 minutes later with the two instruments even more starkly polarized, the piano descending to low C while the violin soars to a stratospheric E, more than five octaves above. Almost imperceptibly, the pianist inserts a G in the middle register, filling out the C major chord that Bartók identified as the sonata’s tonal center. After so much storm and stress, the hushed, euphonious cadence comes as a blessed release.

JANÁČEK: Sonata for Violin and Piano
Leoš Janáček was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, in 1854 and died in Ostrava in 1928. He composed the Sonata for Violin and Piano in 1914-15.

“I wrote the Violin Sonata at the beginning of the war, in 1914, when we were waiting for the Russians in Moravia.” Janáček’s strong pro-Serbian sympathies may have colored his recollection of the genesis of his one and only violin sonata. The sketches for the work are inscribed with the date August 1, the day Germany declared war on Serbia’s ally, Russia. But one movement of the sonata, the luminous Ballada, originated long before the war, and the other three were not fully drafted until October 1915. Moreover, Janáček continued to tinker with the score until its first performance and publication seven years later.

In short, any attempt to read an extramusical program into the Violin Sonata is problematic. Yet Janáček’s score, like so many works of the World War I era, does seem to express a conflict of sorts—a clash between old and new, innocence and experience, soothing ideals and harsh reality. The germ of the sonata was planted in the early, Brahmsian phase of the composer’s career. By the time it came to fruition, however, Janáček’s musical language had undergone a profound transformation. In 1922, he was at work on The Cunning Little Vixen, and the Violin Sonata, in its final form, shares the opera’s distinctive sound world, with its epigrammatic terseness, abrupt changes of atmosphere and irregular, speech-like rhythms.

The opening Con moto movement establishes the sonata’s predominantly urgent, declamatory mood. Beneath the wistfully lyrical surface flows a nervous undercurrent of trills and undulating figures. In the ensuing Ballada, Janáček transforms these faintly menacing sonorities into radiant halos of sound. The third and fourth movements, marked Allegretto and Adagio, respectively, are increasingly agitated, dissonant and almost unremittingly bleak. Commenting on a performance of the Violin Sonata, Janáček praised the musicians for playing “as if a soul had no rest.” The restless, searching spirit that suffuses this remarkable work is very much of its time.

BRAHMS: Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano in D minor, Op. 108
Brahms wrote the Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano between 1886 and 1888.

Brahms’ third sonata, in the “dark” key of D minor, is weightier and more overtly dramatic than its predecessor in A major. Its dedicatee, Hans von Bülow, was a titanic presence at the keyboard as well as on the podium, and the sonata’s impassioned, virtuosic character may well bear his stamp as much as that of the violinist Joachim. From the first bars of the opening Allegro, the staggered eighth-notes and recurrent dynamic swellings hint at the music’s underlying turbulence.

The mood of barely contained wildness is briefly dispelled in the majestic D major Adagio —despite its brevity, one of Brahms’ most concentratedly intense slow movements. This leads to an ethereal scherzo in F-sharp minor, marked Un poco presto e con sentimento, whose opening theme returns at the end in a deceptively tranquil reminiscence. (Brahms’ friend Clara Schumann likened this delicate and devilishly difficult passage to walking on eggshells.) In the final Presto agitato, the sonata’s pent-up energy bursts forth in a highspirited romp in 6/8 meter, charged with stabbing accents and syncopations.

©2008 Harry Haskell

[Distinguished Artists in Recital, Miriam Fried and Jonathan Biss: 5/14/08]