Sonata No. 1 in G Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 78
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Composed in 1879.

Brahms was inspired by his first trip to Italy, in the early months of 1878, to write his 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." 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 is known to have written at least three sonatas for violin before this present work. All were lost, or destroyed by him. (Brahms was almost pathologically secretive about his sketches and unfinished works, and he refused to release any music that was not of the highest quality. He simply burned anything that he did not want others to see. Little, therefore, is known about his methods of composition.) 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 Klavierst¨cke, 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. In his biography of the composer, Peter Latham noted, "Brahms has written nothing more spacious than these three sonatas, in which he never seeks grandeur, and woos rather than compels." Brahms himself allowed that the Sonata was almost too intimate for the concert hall. The work is one of his most endearing creations, and it did much to dispel the then widely held notion that his music was academic and emotionally austere. "[The Sonata] must have won Brahms almost more friends than any of his previous compositions," judged J.A. Fuller-Maitland.

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 work 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.

Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano
György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Composed in 1982. Premiered on August 7, 1982 in Hamburg by violinist Saschko Gawriloff, hornist Hermann Baumann and pianist Eckart Besch. American premiere on July 12, 1984 in Portland at Chamber Music Northwest, by violinist Ida Kavafian, hornist Robin Graham and pianist David Oei.

György Ligeti, one of music's greatest modern masters, was born on May 28, 1923 to a Jewish family in the then Hungarian province of Transylvania. He studied composition at the conservatory in his boyhood home of Kolozsvár during the early years of World War II, when he also managed to take some private lessons in Budapest with the noted Hungarian pianist and composer Pál Kadosa. In 1944, however, Ligeti, with many other Jews, was pressed by the Nazis into forced labor in dangerous situations, including working in a munitions dump just in front of the Russian advance. After the war, Ligeti continued his studies at the Budapest Academy of Music. He pursued field research in Rumanian folk music for a short time following his graduation in 1949, but returned to the Budapest Academy a year later, when he was appointed professor of harmony, counterpoint and analysis. He fled Hungary in the wake of the Russian occupation of 1956, and settled in Vienna, where he met several important figures of the musical avant-garde, most notably Karlheinz Stockhausen; Ligeti became a naturalized Austrian citizen in 1967. In 1957, he was invited to work at the West German Radio in Cologne, where he again took up several modernistic compositions in daring idioms that he had had to put aside because of the repressive political situation in Hungary. He achieved his first wide recognition when his Apparitions was performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Cologne in 1960. Ligeti continued to compose prolifically while teaching at the Darmstadt Contemporary Music Summer Courses, Stockholm Academy of Music, Stanford University, Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and Hamburg Musikhochschule. He was elected to membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, West Berlin Academy of Arts and Hamburg Free Academy of Arts, and received the Bach Prize of the City of Hamburg and the German decoration Pour le mérit. He died in Vienna on June 12, 2006.

Ligeti's Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano of 1982, inscribed as an "Hommage à Brahms," bears in common with that composer's Op. 40 Trio its scoring, its spaciousness of temporal scale, its clarity of structure, and its sharply defined characters for the individual instruments rather than any specific thematic quotation. The opening movement consists of three separate streams of music—violin, horn and piano—flowing independently one beside the other. Though the instruments' rhythmic interaction seems almost random, it is actually so precisely notated that, rather than performing from parts, the players are each provided with a full score so that they can better coordinate their ensemble. A brief passage in (mostly) unanimous rhythms marks the movement's mid-point before the triple-stream of the opening section recommences. Of the buoyant and joyous Vivacissimo, the Trio's scherzo, Ligeti noted, "It is a dance inspired by various kinds of folk music from non-existent peoples; as if Hungary, Rumania and all the Balkan countries lay somewhere between Africa and the Caribbean." The third movement is a cockeyed March in which violin and piano, moving to apparently different drummers, create an atmosphere exactly mid-way between slapstick and surrealism. The horn joins in for a flowing central trio in triple meter that has dropped from some utterly alien expressive universe. The nearly static closing movement, Lament, is built from the chromatically falling melodic figures that have been associated with the expression of pathos since the age of the Renaissance. "Never before," wrote Josef Häusler, "has Ligeti so uninhibitedly conveyed grief, pain and resignation."

Trio in E-Flat Major for Violin, Horn and Piano, Op. 40
Johannes Brahms

Composed in 1865. Premiered on December 12, 1865 in Karlsruhe.

Late in the spring of 1865, Brahms took comfortable rooms for his summer retreat in the ancient German spa town of Baden-Baden, which, he wrote to a friend, "look out on three sides at the dark, wooded mountains, the roads winding up and down them, and the pleasant houses." It was while walking upon the sylvan hillsides above the town that the idea for the Horn Trio occurred to Brahms. (On a later visit, he proudly pointed out to his eventual biographer Albert Dietrich the exact spot where the inspiration for the piece struck.) He began the Trio that summer and continued it after his return to Vienna in the fall, but did not finish the score until November, when he was in Karlsruhe to play his D minor Piano Concerto and to see his friends, the conductor Hermann Levi and the engraver Julius Allgeyer, and in Switzerland for additional concerts. The composer was joined in the work's premiere in Karlsruhe on December 5, 1865 by two musicians known to history only as Strauss (violin) and Segisser (horn).

"There are in the world of chamber music," wrote Daniel Gregory Mason, "few more completely satisfying, more unforgettable experiences than the opening theme of Brahms' Horn Trio. For many of us, the first hearing of it remains all our lives a sort of symbol of all that is romantic in music." This opening movement, written in a leisurely Andante tempo (the speed of Brahms' walk upon the Baden hills?), is disposed in an unusual form; rather than the traditional sonata-allegro, it employs two alternating strains (A–B–A–B–A) whose relaxed structure is the perfect vessel for this amiable music. The energetic Scherzo, almost symphonic in its breadth and tonal variety, is countered by the lyrical melody of the central trio section, one of Brahms' most limpid thematic creations. Adagio mesto—"mournfully"—Brahms marked the following movement. Woven almost imperceptibly into the horn and violin lines soon after the return of its opening strain is the echo of a folk song that Brahms sang as a child, In der Weiden steht ein Haus ("In the meadow stands a house"), which, transformed, becomes the principal theme of the finale, a joyous and life-affirming answer to the sad plaint of the preceding music.