Midori, violin

Özgür Aydin, piano

at Groton Hill Music Center's Meadow Hall (Groton, MA)

  I. Mit humor (“with humor”) “Vanitas vanitatum” (“Vanity of vanities”)
 II. Langsam (“slow”)
III. Nicht schnell, mit viel Ton zu spielen (“not fast, play with a lot of sound”) 
IV. Nicht zu rasch (“not too fast”)
 V. Stark and markirt (“Strong and marked”)

This work has no commissioned note available to accompany it. We thought adding the translations above would help a little with context. The other notable piece of information is that the work, from 1849, was originally written for cello and piano. The composer himself prepared a version for violin and piano, heard tonight, and the first edition's title page includes the words "ad libitum violine" ("violin optional").

When the work was performed on a pre-BSO chamber concert in January 1983, program annotator Steven Ledbetter wrote this note* about the work.

*Courtesy: HENRY, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Performance History Search module.

In his first twenty years, Johannes Brahms made an astonishing leap from a miserable childhood in the downtrodden harbor area of Hamburg to an eminent position as a distinguished young composer. He began his career as a musician at the age of twelve by giving piano lessons for pennies, and at thirteen, he was playing in harborside sailors’ bars. By the age of sixteen, however, he had progressed to playing Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata as well as one of his own compositions in a public concert. In April 1853, just before his twentieth birthday, he set out from Hamburg on a modest concert tour, traveling mostly on foot. In Hanover, he called on the violinist Joseph Joachim, who, at twenty-two, had just become the head of the royal court orchestra there. Joachim was so impressed by Brahms that he gave him a letter of introduction to Liszt in Weimar and sent him to see Schumann in Düsseldorf. Robert Schumann was then Germany’s leading composer, and his wife, Clara, was one of Europe’s greatest pianists. When the Schumanns heard Brahms play, they invited him to their home.

Although this sonata purports to be Brahms’ first sonata for violin and piano, according to the reflections of a student of Brahms, the composer discarded five violin sonatas that he had composed before he wrote this one, the first that he thought good enough to preserve and present to the world. He wrote this sonata during the summers of 1878 and 1879, when he had already become a mature artist. It was his only piece of chamber music from the productive period in which he composed his Symphony No. 2, the “Academic Festival” and “Tragic” overtures, the violin concerto and the second piano concerto.

This sonata, like the Violin Concerto, Op. 77, owes a great deal to Joachim as well as to Clara Schumann, who by then was a widow. Clara was a distinguished pianist and composer in her own right. When Brahms sent Clara a manuscript of this new work, she wrote back, “I must send you a line to tell you how excited I am about your Sonata. It came today. Of course, I played it through at once, and at the end could not help bursting into tears of joy.” Ten years later, when Clara was seventy years old and in failing health, she still loved the sonata and treasured the friendship of both Joachim and Brahms. From her house in Frankfurt she wrote a touching letter to Brahms, in which she said, “Joachim was here on Robert’s eightieth birthday and we had a lot of music. We played the [Op. 78] Sonata again and I reveled in it. I wish that the last movement could accompany me in my journey from here to the next world.”

This sonata is one of the most lyrical compositions among all of Brahms’ instrumental works. The violin always has the leading voice, and the piano writing is always so clear and transparent that an imbalance never exists between the two instruments. There are only three movements, not the usual four frequently considered traditional for a sonata. Brahms wrote to his publisher, clearly in jest, that since he came up one movement short, he would, therefore, accept 25% less than his usual fee for this work.

As in many of Brahms’ compositions, the movements are intimately interrelated. A three-note motto figure is common to all three movements. A mood of gentle nostalgia permeates the first movement, Vivace ma non troppo, and sets the tone and character for the entire sonata. Brahms here works much like Beethoven had before him: he introduces a germ out of which themes for the whole movement will eventually evolve and grow. The second movement is a solemn and dramatic Adagio, and the third, a rondo, Allegro molto moderato, contains an episode in which Brahms brings back the slow movement theme. The principal melodic material of this movement, however, comes from a related pair of his songs, “Regenlied” (“Rain Song”) and “Nachklang” (“Reminiscence”), Op. 59, nos. 3 and 4.

© Susan Halpern, 2025

Program note to come

A common mantra for instrumentalists of any kind goes something like this: play like you’re singing. Performers often set their ambitions to meet this simple but lofty goal, feeling that the zenith of great performing hinges on the elusive characteristic. This is especially true for strings, whose expressive flexibility is maximized by use of a bow, giving them the best chance to surmount that Olympus. It is fitting, then, that songs such as Ravel’s “Kaddish” from Two Hebrew Songs, one of the most expressive vocal pieces in the modern repertoire, should be performed on the violin. 

Ravel’s investigation of the “other” (see the note for Tzigane for more discussion on this) here mines the rich Jewish cantor tradition, using a version of a traditional melody to set the mourner’s "Kaddish," or prayer for the dead. Ravel was sensitive to the idea that accompaniment should clarify rather than aggrandize a melody, especially one as meaningful as a setting of the "Kaddish." Nowhere in his work did he more expertly apply this principle than in this simple little tune. After a first section where the piano chimes transparently in its upper register, an “amen” sounds in the melody, beginning a long, slow descent toward the end of the piece accentuated by evocative harmonic motion that gives the sense of a story being told. The melody never loses its predominance as the broad accompaniment gives space for the violin to adorn itself. It is a beautiful setting that skillfully conveys the virtuosic performance of emotion that characterizes the cantor tradition. 

© Connor Buckley, 2025 

Ravel is a composer, like Debussy, who is so associated with a particular kind of Frenchness that his frequent musical globetrotting can be surprising even to experienced listeners. His Tzigane for violin and piano, inspired by Hungarian music, is exactly the kind of thing that might shock listeners used to Jeux d’eau and Daphnis et Chloé. It is in line with a long tradition: since at least the seventeenth century, the perception of the “other” has played a prominent role in Western Classical composition. Composers of German, Italian, French, and English cultural backgrounds would sometimes attempt to convey exoticism to their listener by, say, adding guitar to an orchestra to evoke Spanishness, or using orientalist tropes to evoke Arabness. Composers of the early twentieth century frequently took advantage of this tradition to express their supposed freedom from the norms of European high art, and to signal newness in a climate of fervent modernism. Increasingly during this period, the “other” that composers found inspiring were peasants from understudied European folk traditions, fueled by academic interest in describing and cataloging these traditions. It is this context, as well as the music of Liszt, that allowed Ravel to musically describe a peasant gathering in Hungary, albeit one that is highly stylized and contextually removed. 

The piece is structured as a single movement, beginning with a dramatic, extended solo cadenza for the violin. Its rhapsodic structure is reminiscent of Béla Bartók’s later Violin Sonata No. 2, itself partly a version of the hora lungă, a type of rhythmically flexible improvised song. The first two notes of the piece recall the opening of Bach’s Second Violin Partita, an allusion that signals the piece’s virtuosic ambitions. The remainder of the solo is a tour de force of techniques and expressive variation, and its push and pull in tempo and intensity lends a sense of anticipation of what’s to come. 

When the accompaniment finally enters, the music gains momentum, shifting into a relentless, driving rhythm that propels the piece forward. The meaning is clear—like in Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, a calm gathering of the people has now transformed into a dance party. The piano provides a steady foundation, while the violin spins out a dazzling array of rapid passages, syncopated rhythms, and soaring melodic lines. The harmonic language of this section is unmistakably Ravelian, finally incorporating the lush chromaticism that French impressionism is so closely associated with. While the work feels Hungarian in vibe, its world is high art modernism, and Ravel does not pretend otherwise. It is fresh, indicative of the high art potential of common music that composers of the time found so electrifying. 

© Connor Buckley, 2025