![György Ligeti - Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano [With score] @DamonJHK](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hl6zjQT_P_Y/maxresdefault.jpg)
Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
-Composer: György Sándor Ligeti (28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006)
-Performers: Marie-Luise Neunecker (horn), Saschko Gawriloff (violin), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano ("Hommage à Brahms"), written in 1982
0:00 - I. Andante con tenerezza
6:17 - II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico
11:46 - III. Alla marcia
15:02 - IV. Lamento. Adagio
Ligeti's Trio for violin, horn, and piano was completed in 1982 and premiered on August 7 of that year. Apart from some smaller works, including Hungarian Rock (chaconne) and Passacaglia ungherese for harpsichord, Ligeti had composed very little since completing Le Grand Macabre in 1977. The extreme eclecticism and physical scope of the opera seem to have cast the composer into a compositional crisis: what does one write when one has just finished writing everything? As many composers before him had done, Ligeti turned to music history and other musical cultures for an answer. Though Ligeti had never been averse to history, his more explicit turn in that direction is reflected in the chaconne and passacaglia forms in the 1978 harpsichord pieces and in the final scene of Le Grand Macabre, which itself is a passacaglia. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Ligeti gained inspiration from many sources, but most particularly from study of sub-Saharan African drumming and from research into fractal procedures in mathematics. In 1980 Ligeti also discovered the music of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), whose multi-layered, complex studies for player piano closely paralleled Ligeti's rhythmic interests at the time.
Ligeti also became interested in the music of Chopin and Schumann, particularly in their use of rubato and hemiola (a subverting of the predominant rhythmic pattern with a different division of the beat). The idea of a melodic line carrying its own distinct rhythmic burden became one of the main concerns of the Trio for violin, horn, and piano. Ligeti had another, even more specific influence in the horn trio of Brahms Op. 40 (1865). Ligeti's musical language, having emerged from the vex of a writer's block, is paradoxically purified and direct in its presentation of ambiguous rhythmic cross-relations and skewed harmonic clichés, such as several versions of the common "horn fifths" motif. In the first movement the violin and horn engage in a duet of two tempos, but the relationship between the two is relatively exact. The horn is the main melodic instrument, soaring in high, fast runs. In spite of the apparent complexity of the melodic language, the harmonic profile of the movement, and of the piece as a whole, is surprisingly diatonic. After the circumspect first movement, the motoric but dancing rhythms of the second and third movements show the results of Ligeti's knowledge of the musics of Africa and the Caribbean, and of Nancarrow. The second movement is in an eighth note pulse that is further subdivided into groups of three plus two plus three. Ligeti manipulates the groupings of this pattern to produce seemingly different tempos among the three instruments, a technique he took even further in the Six Piano Études of the following year. The third movement begins with a stuttering rhythmic unison that gradually goes out of phase. A lyrical, legato section succeeds this material with differing phrase lengths among the instruments. The final movement is a lament based loosely on the sorrowful, descending funeral chants of several Eastern European cultures. Again, the varying phrase lengths are an important expressive aspect of the music.
The Trio for violin, horn, and piano led directly to the Études for piano, Book I of 1985 and to the Piano Concerto of 1985-1988. Portions of all three works share virtually the same concerns, and reuse very specific gestures and modes of expression, just as Ligeti reused those ticking clocks and harmonic clouds throughout his earlier music.
[allmusic.com]
-Composer: György Sándor Ligeti (28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006)
-Performers: Marie-Luise Neunecker (horn), Saschko Gawriloff (violin), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano ("Hommage à Brahms"), written in 1982
0:00 - I. Andante con tenerezza
6:17 - II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico
11:46 - III. Alla marcia
15:02 - IV. Lamento. Adagio
Ligeti's Trio for violin, horn, and piano was completed in 1982 and premiered on August 7 of that year. Apart from some smaller works, including Hungarian Rock (chaconne) and Passacaglia ungherese for harpsichord, Ligeti had composed very little since completing Le Grand Macabre in 1977. The extreme eclecticism and physical scope of the opera seem to have cast the composer into a compositional crisis: what does one write when one has just finished writing everything? As many composers before him had done, Ligeti turned to music history and other musical cultures for an answer. Though Ligeti had never been averse to history, his more explicit turn in that direction is reflected in the chaconne and passacaglia forms in the 1978 harpsichord pieces and in the final scene of Le Grand Macabre, which itself is a passacaglia. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Ligeti gained inspiration from many sources, but most particularly from study of sub-Saharan African drumming and from research into fractal procedures in mathematics. In 1980 Ligeti also discovered the music of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), whose multi-layered, complex studies for player piano closely paralleled Ligeti's rhythmic interests at the time.
Ligeti also became interested in the music of Chopin and Schumann, particularly in their use of rubato and hemiola (a subverting of the predominant rhythmic pattern with a different division of the beat). The idea of a melodic line carrying its own distinct rhythmic burden became one of the main concerns of the Trio for violin, horn, and piano. Ligeti had another, even more specific influence in the horn trio of Brahms Op. 40 (1865). Ligeti's musical language, having emerged from the vex of a writer's block, is paradoxically purified and direct in its presentation of ambiguous rhythmic cross-relations and skewed harmonic clichés, such as several versions of the common "horn fifths" motif. In the first movement the violin and horn engage in a duet of two tempos, but the relationship between the two is relatively exact. The horn is the main melodic instrument, soaring in high, fast runs. In spite of the apparent complexity of the melodic language, the harmonic profile of the movement, and of the piece as a whole, is surprisingly diatonic. After the circumspect first movement, the motoric but dancing rhythms of the second and third movements show the results of Ligeti's knowledge of the musics of Africa and the Caribbean, and of Nancarrow. The second movement is in an eighth note pulse that is further subdivided into groups of three plus two plus three. Ligeti manipulates the groupings of this pattern to produce seemingly different tempos among the three instruments, a technique he took even further in the Six Piano Études of the following year. The third movement begins with a stuttering rhythmic unison that gradually goes out of phase. A lyrical, legato section succeeds this material with differing phrase lengths among the instruments. The final movement is a lament based loosely on the sorrowful, descending funeral chants of several Eastern European cultures. Again, the varying phrase lengths are an important expressive aspect of the music.
The Trio for violin, horn, and piano led directly to the Études for piano, Book I of 1985 and to the Piano Concerto of 1985-1988. Portions of all three works share virtually the same concerns, and reuse very specific gestures and modes of expression, just as Ligeti reused those ticking clocks and harmonic clouds throughout his earlier music.
[allmusic.com]
![György Ligeti - Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hl6zjQT_P_Y/mqdefault.jpg "György Ligeti - Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano [With score]
-Composer: György Sándor Ligeti (28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006)
-Performers: Marie-Luise Neunecker (horn), Saschko Gawriloff (violin), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano (Hommage à Brahms), written in 1982
0:00 - I. Andante con tenerezza
6:17 - II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico
11:46 - III. Alla marcia
15:02 - IV. Lamento. Adagio
Ligetis Trio for violin, horn, and piano was completed in 1982 and premiered on August 7 of that year. Apart from some smaller works, including Hungarian Rock (chaconne) and Passacaglia ungherese for harpsichord, Ligeti had composed very little since completing Le Grand Macabre in 1977. The extreme eclecticism and physical scope of the opera seem to have cast the composer into a compositional crisis: what does one write when one has just finished writing everything? As many composers before him had done, Ligeti turned to music history and other musical cultures for an answer. Though Ligeti had never been averse to history, his more explicit turn in that direction is reflected in the chaconne and passacaglia forms in the 1978 harpsichord pieces and in the final scene of Le Grand Macabre, which itself is a passacaglia. In the late 1970s and early 80s, Ligeti gained inspiration from many sources, but most particularly from study of sub-Saharan African drumming and from research into fractal procedures in mathematics. In 1980 Ligeti also discovered the music of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), whose multi-layered, complex studies for player piano closely paralleled Ligetis rhythmic interests at the time.
Ligeti also became interested in the music of Chopin and Schumann, particularly in their use of rubato and hemiola (a subverting of the predominant rhythmic pattern with a different division of the beat). The idea of a melodic line carrying its own distinct rhythmic burden became one of the main concerns of the Trio for violin, horn, and piano. Ligeti had another, even more specific influence in the horn trio of Brahms Op. 40 (1865). Ligetis musical language, having emerged from the vex of a writers block, is paradoxically purified and direct in its presentation of ambiguous rhythmic cross-relations and skewed harmonic clichés, such as several versions of the common horn fifths motif. In the first movement the violin and horn engage in a duet of two tempos, but the relationship between the two is relatively exact. The horn is the main melodic instrument, soaring in high, fast runs. In spite of the apparent complexity of the melodic language, the harmonic profile of the movement, and of the piece as a whole, is surprisingly diatonic. After the circumspect first movement, the motoric but dancing rhythms of the second and third movements show the results of Ligetis knowledge of the musics of Africa and the Caribbean, and of Nancarrow. The second movement is in an eighth note pulse that is further subdivided into groups of three plus two plus three. Ligeti manipulates the groupings of this pattern to produce seemingly different tempos among the three instruments, a technique he took even further in the Six Piano Études of the following year. The third movement begins with a stuttering rhythmic unison that gradually goes out of phase. A lyrical, legato section succeeds this material with differing phrase lengths among the instruments. The final movement is a lament based loosely on the sorrowful, descending funeral chants of several Eastern European cultures. Again, the varying phrase lengths are an important expressive aspect of the music.
The Trio for violin, horn, and piano led directly to the Études for piano, Book I of 1985 and to the Piano Concerto of 1985-1988. Portions of all three works share virtually the same concerns, and reuse very specific gestures and modes of expression, just as Ligeti reused those ticking clocks and harmonic clouds throughout his earlier music.
[allmusic.com]")
![Dmitri Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No. 1 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i6rU9AYzCws/mqdefault.jpg "Dmitri Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No. 1 [With score]
Composer: Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (25 September 1906 9 August 1975)
Orchestra: Philadelphia Orchestra
Conductor: Eugene Ormandy
Cello: Mstislav Rostropovich [Also the dedicatee]
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107, written in 1959
00:04 - I. Allegretto
06:36 - II. Moderato
17:14 - III. Cadenza
22:47 - IV. Allegro con moto
Shostakovich composed this music in July 1959 and Mstislav Rostropovich introduced it at Leningrad on October 4, with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting. It is lightly scored for double winds, piccolo, contrabassoon, a single horn (no other brass), timpani, celesta, and strings.
Although a prolific composer in other forms, Shostakovich wrote only six concertos. If those for keyboard seem prevailingly saucy and sun dappled, the four string concertos are somberly serious. Where theres any laughter at all, it sounds forced and hollow. To lighten it (or try) only reinforces the holy fool (yurodivy) analogy that haunts Solomon Volkovs Testimony, the posthumously alleged Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich.
When the First Cello Concerto was written with almost Mozartean speed, Stalin had been dead six years but not forgotten. In 1958 Boris Pasternak was forced to decline a Nobel Prize for his anti-Stalinist novel, Doctor Zhivago, and then was expelled from the Writers Union. Ian MacDonald, in The New Shostakovich, concluded that Pasternaks humiliation and subsequent persecution significantly influenced the First Cello Concerto. Volkov, on the other hand, gave no hint, nor did Elizabeth Wilson in A Life Remembered. Most of what she included, anent the concerto, was Rostropovichs celebration of himself, with this notable exception: In the First Cello Concerto [M.R. speaking], Shostakovich alludes to Stalins favorite song, Suliko. These allusions are undoubtedly not accidental, but...are camouflaged so craftily that even I didnt notice them to begin with. The first time Dmitry Dmitriyevich hummed this passage through to me [from the concluding rondo movement], he laughed and said, Slava, have you noticed?
Cello Concerto No. 1 is a major-key work in minor keys more often than not, recalling the mature Schuberts subtle modulations. It was his first large-scale undertaking after the Eleventh Symphony a year earlier and one of the works he quoted in his autobiographical Eighth String Quartet of 1960.
The published score has a preface, adapted as follows by the late Leonard Burkat:
This four-movement concerto is divided into two large parts: the opening movement, and then three more movements played without pause. Together, they form an integral whole with unified themes and images.
The main theme of the Allegretto first movement is a [four-note] motto that lends itself to dynamic development and reappears many times. The second theme is a rich musical image of Russian character, full of stoic grief and strength of will.
The second movement, Moderato, has a restrained introduction, after which the cello sings a song-like theme against violas in the background. The melodious second theme is highly expressive, leading to a dramatic climax.
The third Andantino Allegro movement is monolog for unaccompanied cello [i.e., a long cadenza] that recalls the first-movement motto and second movement themes while preparing for The Allegro con moto finale in rondo form [that] sums up the whole work, with a coda [based on] the principal subject of the first movement.... The end is both harsh and abrupt.
[allmusic.com]")
![Igor Stravinsky - Mass for chorus and double wind quintet [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iRi_MDy_ks0/mqdefault.jpg "Igor Stravinsky - Mass for chorus and double wind quintet [With score]
-Composer: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971)
-Performers: Ensemble Musikfabrik
-Choir: RIAS Kammerchor
-Conductor: Daniel Reuss
Mass for chorus and double wind quintet, written in 1948
00:00 - I. Kyrie
02:34 - II. Gloria
06:17 - III. Credo
10:45 - IV. Sanctus
14:25 - V. Agnus Dei
After the composition of Oedipus rex (1926-1927) it was unusual for Stravinsky to write a non-commissioned work. Also, since 1926 Stravinsky had been a communicant of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, it seems peculiar that the composer would write a concerted Latin mass. The motivation stems from what seems to have been a negative reaction to some masses of Mozart, which Stravinsky found in a second-hand music store in Los Angeles in 1942. The choice of the traditional Latin text of the Catholic Mass was a practical one: the Russian Orthodox Church proscribed the use of instruments in services, and Stravinsky did not want to write an unaccompanied vocal work.
The ensemble consists of a chorus of children, altos, tenors, and basses, and a double wind quintet. The opening of the Kyrie contrasts the timbres of the wind instruments, and the voices enter by imitating the instrumental introduction. Mirroring the text, the chorus intones three complete statements of Kyrie eleison before the central, Christe eleison section. After the first statement of Christe eleison, the music takes on a clearly articulated pulse, and the children take center stage. The animated atmosphere continues through the return of the Kyrie text. Throughout the Gloria movement the vocal texture alternates between full chorus, duet, and solo. Near the middle, at Domine Deus, a pair of voices evokes a style reminiscent of thirteenth century parallel organum, one instance in the mass that illuminates Stravinskys familiarity with Medieval and Renaissance sacred music (although in Expositions and Developments Stravinsky claimed that he did not hear Machauts mass until after he had completed his own). For the Credo, Stravinsky gave a large nod to tradition by directing that the first phrase, Credo in unum deum, be sung by the celebrant alone. In fact, the composer specified the use of the plainchant melody listed as the authentic Credo intonation in the Liber Usualis. The harmonic organization of the movement bears a close relationship to the pitches of the plainchant intonation, and the opening and closing tonal areas (E and G) match the chants first two pitches. The central part of the movement features a more strident sonority dominated by a major seventh chord. Like most composers of masses before him, Stravinsky set the lengthy Credo text syllabically. The composer described the movement rather succinctly: The Credo is the longest movement. There is much to believe. The celebrant opens the Sanctus alone, and each of his florid statements of Sanctus is echoed by the chorus. In another nod to tradition, Stravinsky sets the Benedictus off from the rest of the movement, both by setting the text to contrasting music and by framing it with the same music for both appearances of the Hosanna in excelsis. The Agnus Dei is built around an instrumental ritornello, which opens the movement and separates the three lines of text.
[allmusic.com]")
![Igor Stravinsky - Septet [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ijSmRoPzMaY/mqdefault.jpg "Igor Stravinsky - Septet [With score]
-Composer: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971)
-Performers: European Soloists Ensemble, Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano)
Septet for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello, written in 1953
00:00 - I. ♩ = 88
02:52 - II. Passacaglia, Circa ♩ = 60
07:43 - III. Gigue, dotted ♪ = 112-116
For much of their two respective careers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg were seen by the musical establishment as representing two opposite ideals of twentieth-century music two mutually exclusive stylistic and technical mentalities that, in the end, couldnt possibly be reconciled to one another. Certainly the two composers, by virtually ignoring each other during their lengthy period as neighbors in Hollywood during the 1940s, did little to discourage the animosity that frequently flared up between their respective followers. We now know, however, how wrong that idea was, for almost immediately after Schoenbergs death in 1951 Stravinsky began to explore tentatively at first, then with more surety of purpose the possibilities that the Second Viennese Schools developments might offer him. It is as if composing The Rakes Progress in the late 1940s had finally purged Stravinsky of most of his so-called Neo-Classical urges and left him in a position to begin investigating other vehicles of musical thought. One of the earliest works in which we can really begin to see the incorporation of serial techniques (note that this does not by any means mean twelve-tone techniques at least not yet) into Stravinskys own personal idiom is the remarkable Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, violin, viola, and cello, composed during 1952 and 1953 and first performed at Dumbarton Oaks in early 1954.
To be fair, even as early as the 1920s Stravinsky had used recurrent pitch organizations in a way very similar in detail if not sound to the fundamentals of Second Viennese Schools thinking. In the Septet, however, the manner of working such basic intervallic units out on a structural level can rightly be heard as something new in the composers music.
At the beginning of the first of the works three movements we find the clarinet singing out the seven note figure A-E-D-C-B-A-C sharp from which almost all of the thematic and accompanimental material of the entire work is derived. The seventh pitch is certainly of great significance over the course of the work: the conflict of C natural and C sharp within an A tonal context shows, as does the basic superficial style and rhythmic layout of this first movement, a strong connection to the Neo-Classical phase the composer was just beginning to depart from; perhaps even more significantly, that same chromatic alteration is made into the basis of all the chromatic meanderings of the theme used in the second movement.
The second movement, Passacaglia, is built on repeated statements of a sixteen-note subject that begins with the first five pitches (transposed up a fifth) of our intervallic unit. Throughout the seven variations (and one final statement) that make up the movement, all of the basic serial operations are made inversion, retrograde, and the various combinations of the two.
The same intervallic material is used as the basis for four fugal episodes the first and third featuring the strings, the second and fourth the piano and winds in the final, quick-paced Gigue. Throughout the second and third fugues, the piano echoes the music of the string fugues while the woodwinds go off on their own, justifying the idea hinted at all along (including in the title) that the piano is really a kind of mediator between the two disparate instrumental trios.
[allmusic.com]")
![Etude mécanique No. 1 [My composition]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ipL7_tfKF7U/mqdefault.jpg "Etude mécanique No. 1 [My composition]
Etude for Ninths and finger agility")
![Igor Stravinsky - Renard [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iw3jWpJK-JA/mqdefault.jpg "Igor Stravinsky - Renard [With score]
-Compsoer: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971)
-Ensemble: Budapest Chamber Ensemble
-Vocal Soloists: Dénes Gulyás, Boldizsár Keönch, György Bordás, László Polgár
-Conductor: András Mihály
Renard [The Fox], Opera-Ballet (Burlesque) for 4 vocal soloists & chamber orchestra. OR: Renard [The Fox], A burlesque for the stage with singing and music, written in 1915-1916
In April 1915 Winnaretta Singer (la Princesse Edmond de Polignac), commissioned Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. She paid the composer 2,500 Swiss francs. The work was completed in Morges (Switzerland) in 1916, and Stravinsky himself made a staging plan, trying to avoid any resemblance to the operatic staging or conventions. He created rather a new form of theatre in which the acrobatic dance is connected with singing, and the declamation comments on the musical action. However the piece was never performed in the salon of the princess. It was not staged until 1922.
Stravinskys Renard belongs to a genre perhaps best described as ballet hybrid. In addition to the expected dance elements, Renard is also a burlesque, a musical story that is sung and played. The text was written by Stravinsky himself, after stories of the Fox from the famous collection of Russian folk tales by Alexander Afanasiev. Renard is scored for small orchestra, percussion, timpani, cimbalom, a solo string quintet, two tenor soloists, and two bass soloists.
The story is a farmyard tale in which the Cock is twice tricked and captured by the Fox , only to be rescued each time by the Cat and the Goat. After the Cocks second rescue, the Cat and the Goat strangle the Fox, and the three friends dance and sing. Stravinsky employs the singers as part of the orchestra, and though there are exactly as many singers as characters, the vocal parts are not identified with specific characters. (The composer followed this practice in subsequent works of the same type, most notably in Les noces of 1914-1917.)
The players remain onstage at all times, without the kind of choreography one associates with traditional ballet. Rather, as the prefatory note in the score indicates, the various characters should be played by clowns, dancers, or acrobats who perform in front of the curtain. Stravinsky makes prominent use of the cimbalom, a stringed instrument played with mallets, to imitate the sound of a guzla, a similar Russian folk instrument. Stravinsky knew that finding good guzla players (or even the instrument itself) would be difficult, and settled on the cimbalom after hearing it played in a nightclub in Switzerland. According to the composer, most of Renard was actually composed on the cimbalom rather than on the piano that was more usual for Stravinsky. The cimbalom, an instrument on which rapid repeating notes and broad arpeggios are highly idiomatic, contributes significantly to the works linear texture. Stravinsky employs the other instruments in an almost soloistic manner, further contributing to the works polyphonic textures. Renards melodies are wide-ranging and disjunct, while the mixture of modes connects it to the polytonal/polymodal harmonic style of earlier works like Petrushka (1910-1911). Renards relative rhythmic and metric simplicity contrasts sharply with the richly complex rhythmic language of nearly contemporaneous works like The Rite of Spring (1911-1913).
[wikipedia/allmusic]")
![Edvard Grieg - 5 Poems, op. 26 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iwMTf9QR2Wg/mqdefault.jpg "Edvard Grieg - 5 Poems, op. 26 [With score]
-Composer: Edvard Hagerup Grieg (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907)
-Performers (Songs 1, 2, 3, 4): Monica Groop (Voice), Roger Vignoles (Piano)
-Performers (Song 5): Marianne Hirsti (soprano), Rudolf Jansen (Piano)
5 Poems for Voice and Piano, op. 26, written in 1876
00:00 - I. Et Håb {Hope}
02:20 - II. Jeg rejste en dejlig Sommerkvæld {I wandered one lovely summer evening}
04:55 - III. Den Ærgjerige {The ambitious one}
06:21 - IV. Med en Primula veris {With a primrose}
07:39 - V. På Skogstien {On a woodland path}")
![Edvard Grieg - Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 45 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iwTZoiRvp1U/mqdefault.jpg "Edvard Grieg - Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 45 [With score]
Composer: Edvard Hagerup Grieg (15 June 1843 4 September 1907)
Performers: Uto Ughi (violin), Bruno Canino (piano)
Sonata for Violin and Piano in c minor, op. 45, written in 1886-87
00:00 - I. Allegro molto ed appassionato
09:50 - II. Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza - Allegro molto - Tempo I.
15:54 - III. Allegro animato
In January 1900, Grieg performed his three violin sonatas with Wilma Neruda-Hallé in Copenhagen. Afterward, he wrote to his friend the Norwegian poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson that his violin sonata trilogy was closely related to his own lifes experiences. They characterize the three periods of my own evolution, he explained. The first, ingenious and full of new ideas; the second, nationalistic, and the third, turned toward vaster horizons. Indeed, in the series of violin sonatas we do sense a logical, natural progression that may well seem autobiographical.
The set of three culminates with the massive C minor sonata, Op. 45, written in 1887. Whereas each of the previous sonatas had been set down in a matter of just a few weeks, Op. 45 was begun in the autumn of 1886 and was finished, according to the composers journal, on January 21 of the following year. The work was dedicated to the painter Franz von Lehnbach, and had its premiere at the Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig on December 10, 1887, in a performance by the Russian violinist Adolf Brodsky with Grieg himself at the piano. The work was enthusiastically hailed by critics and public alike. Within a very short time, it had entered the repertories of other leading violinists of the day, among them Wieniawski, Ysaÿe, and Kreisler.
Although Grieg characterized the piece as the product of newfound inspiration found during a time of personal happiness, such origins are hardly reflected by the terse urgency of the thematic material nor by the choice of key, a defiantly Beethovenian C minor. The dimensions are expansive, and the work takes about 25 minutes to perform. The opening movement (Allegretto molto ed appassionato) offers a tense first-subject motif, with the second group altogether more relaxed and consoling in mood. The darkly somber development section is based entirely upon the first theme, which also makes a further appearance after the recapitulation just prior to the very dramatic coda. There follows a slow movement (Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza) in the serene tonality of E major. Interestingly, piano and violin assume quite independent roles here; though each is heard in the noble main theme (some 44 measures in length), there is little sense of dialogue or equitable exchange between the two. The individuality of the two instruments is heightened to a surprising extent here, and even in the final section the two are never fully reconciled. The finale (Allegro animato) has a sonata structure (ABAB-Coda) without a development section, the lack of which is compensated for in a series of daring modulations that involve digressions into A flat major and F major. In the words of Rune J. Andersen, the piece contains universal and national elements fused into something deeply personal and specifically Griegian.
[allmusic.com]
Original Audio: https://youtu.be/k3ZXpdvAOEY")
![Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quartet No. 21, K. 575 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jJJrD19AMhg/mqdefault.jpg "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quartet No. 21, K. 575 [With score]
-Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)
-Performers: Alban Berg Quartet
String Quartet No. 21 in D-Major, K. 575, written in 1789 [Prussian Quartet I]
00:00 – I. Allegretto
07:35 – II. Andante
11:38 – III. Menuetto & Trio. Allegretto
17:28 – IV. Allegretto
In the spring of 1789, Mozart, in financial straits and desperately in need of new work, set off on a journey to Germany. After visiting Dresden and Leipzig, he arrived in Potsdam on April 25. The city was at the time the virtual capital of Prussia and the residence of the cello-playing King Frederick William II. The following day a memorandum requesting that one Motzart had requested an audience with the king to lay before him his talents was presented to Frederick William, who referred the request to his director of chamber music, Jean Pierre Duport. What resulted is unfortunately not recorded at the time, but according to later reports supplied by Mozarts widow Constanze the king offered Mozart a post worth 3,000 thaler a year. The composer is said to have expressed concerns about leaving his good Emperor (Joseph II) in Vienna. Whatever the truth of the story, Mozart returned to Vienna with some kind of a commission from Frederick William to compose six new string quartets.
By June the present D major Quartet had already been completed, but of the remaining quartets only two were composed, and then only after the lapse of a year. Various reasons have been advanced as an explanation as to why Mozart was so slow in producing the Prussian quartets, but one is that the composer had received money upfront from the Prussian king; in a money-begging letter to Puchberg he mentions having the quartets engraved at his own expense. The three Prussian quartets which were completed are notable for the prominence of their cello parts, obviously intended to please the cello-playing king. In the opening Allegretto of K. 575, for instance, it is the cello that is given the task of presenting the second theme, and all three quartets contain many passages in which the cello emerges either as soloist or in dialogue with one of the other instruments. The K. 575 quartet as a whole is notable for its understated, almost secretive mood. The Andante is a deceptively simple movement that showcases the cello as an agent independent of the other instruments, and the Menuetto (Allegretto) is distinguished by a brief eruption of passion at the start of its second half. The concluding Allegretto opens with a theme given to the cello high in its register before proceeding to run a more disturbed course than is apparent in the remainder of the work. As in other works from the last years of Mozarts life, there is a delightful incorporation of counterpoint into a texture of Classical ease, here in the form of an ornate canon. Scholars have also found fragments of an alternate finale in which Mozart seemed to indulge his puckish side.
[allmusic.com]")
![Paul Hindemith - Suite 1922 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jRLf-0QWcXY/mqdefault.jpg "Paul Hindemith - Suite 1922 [With score]
-Composer: (16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963)
-Performer: Sviatoslav Richter
-Recorded in 1989
Suite 1922, for piano, Op. 26, written in 1921-22
00:00 - I. Marsch
01:36 - II. Shimmy
04:54 - III. Nachtstück
11:44 - IV. Boston
18:04 - V. Ragtime
Whereas in the Kleine Kammermusik of 1921 Hindemith chuckled good-naturedly about such shopworn forms as marches and waltzes, in the 1922 Suite for solo piano, his attitude toward the march, shimmy, Boston and ragtime is more plainly bad-tempered. In the years immediately following the First World War, Hindemith had been privately composing pastiches of popular dances of the day, but had held them back from publication, considering them mere sports. By 1922, however, Hindemith no longer had any qualms about using popular music as a basis for serious musical statements.
In Suite 1922, satire borders on sarcasm; in the opening Marsch, the pianist is instructed to play it rather clumsily. The writing for the piano is unusually thick and heavy with chords, especially in the left hand; as such it is almost unrecognizable as coming from one of the master contrapuntalists of the twentieth century. The rhythm is irregular, and the harmonies built on dissonant, cluster-like explosions and angular aggregations of fourths and fifths make for a very unmarchable march indeed.
The other dance forms are similarly undermined in the suite. The second movement, Shimmy, is based on a dance-hall variant of the foxtrot, but makes only occasional allusions to the form, spending most of its time musing on a dour, ambiguously harmonized theme. The central Nachtstück anticipates Hindemiths serious and contemplative mature style harmonically quite dark in this instance; the central section is ethereal, with haunting motives drifting about in the upper range of the keyboard. It is succeeded by an equally unsettled Boston an old American dance with similarities to the waltz. Repeated attempts to establish the requisite triple-time drift instead into tonally ambiguous (albeit fascinating) meditations. For the Ragtime finale, Hindemith instructs the pianist to play wildly but in strict rhythm, and to [r]egard the piano here as an interesting percussion instrument. Dissonance reaches its maximum intensity in this loud and disturbing movement.
In 1940, Hindemith wrote to Hugo Strecker, I think it is not necessary to reprint that awful Suite 1922.... The piece is really not an honorable ornament in the music-history of our time, and it depresses an old man rather seriously to see that just the sins of his youth impress the people more than his better creations. That it continued to impress listeners, however, amply demonstrates its intrinsic value.
[allmusic.com]")
![Alexander Borodin - Piano Quintet [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jViUmSHwsn4/mqdefault.jpg "Alexander Borodin - Piano Quintet [With score]
-Composer: Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (12 November 1833 – 27 February 1887)
-Performers: Moscow String Quartet and Alexander Mndoiantz
Piano Quintet in c minor, written in 1862
00:03 – I. Andante
05:39 – II. Allegro non troppo
11:34 – III. Allegro moderato
While in Heidelberg in May 1861, Borodin met and fell in love with the pianist Yekaterina Protopopova, who soon became his wife, and who seems to have inspired in him a taste for her favourite composers, Chopin and Schumann. Later that year she fell ill, and the engaged couple wintered in Italy. There in May and June 1862 Borodin composed his Piano Quintet in C minor, the last work he would complete before his game-changing meeting with Balakirev.
That the twenty-eight-year-old composer was already ripe for adoption to the nationalist cause is evident from the opening theme, which has the contours and character of a Russian melismatic song. In fact the entire first movement is made up of variations, repetitions and derivations from this idea, dressed up in piano textures that could easily have come from Anton Rubinstein on the other side of the nationalist/academic divide.
The movement feels quite happy to end in A minor, rather than the tonic C minor, and it is in A minor that the scherzo second movement launches out, its main theme being another thinly disguised variation on motifs from the first movement. A bouncy violin theme provides contrast, and once again enthusiasm and directness of feeling, rather than sophisticated technique, carry the movement forward. The trio section rhapsodizes freely, never feeling obliged to put all five instruments together.
The finale is once again subtly derived motivically, and its initial motifs are never all that far from the surface. As with the cello sonata, the opening mood—wistful in this case—is a feint. The music soon becomes more robust, before taking flight à la Mendelssohn. Here Borodin attempts a full sonata from, complete with repeated exposition. From a Germanic perspective many ideas go to waste; from a Russian-nationalist one, however, it is entirely virtuous that they should be unhampered by excessive learning. This is music for use and enjoyment, unconcerned with conforming to ‘comme il faut’. The structure may be wayward, but this at least means that the listener is kept intrigued as to when and how it will end. Always apparently winding up, in the end it seems to wind down before reaching its full potential; but the soft conclusion suggests that Borodin knew what he was aiming at.")
![Robert Schumann - Vier Gesänge {Four Songs}, op. 142 [With score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jYe8pkmNa-w/mqdefault.jpg "Robert Schumann - Vier Gesänge {Four Songs}, op. 142 [With score]
-Composer: Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856)
-Performers I. and IV. : Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Baritone), Christoph Eschenbach (Piano)
-Performers II. and III. : Peter Schreier (Tenor), Norman Shetler (Piano)
Vier Lieder {Four Songs} for Voice and Piano, op. 142, written in 1840 and 1852
[00:00] - I. Trost im Gesang
[02:31] - II. Lehn deine Wang
[03:21] - III. Mädchen-Schwermut
[06:23] - IV. Mein Wagen rollet langsam
Assembled from songs Schumann left unpublished at his death, the four lieder of Op. 142 were published in 1858 by Rieter-Biedermann and dedicated to Frau Livia Frege by the publisher.
Trost im Gesang (Solace in song), by Justinus Kerner, laments the lonely existence of the night traveler. Just as the traveler wanders off the path because it is difficult to see, Schumann moves from the opening E flat major to a distant D major at the center of this ternary-form structure. The accompaniment, plodding and non-melodic, follows the rhythm of the melody but not the shape.
Lehn deine Wang (Rest your cheeks [against my cheeks]), by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), was originally intended for the Dichterliebe, Op. 48; set aside by the composer, it remained unknown until after his death. Opening in G minor, the songs narrator asks a lover to lay her cheek against his so their tears may mingle. The second half of the song modulates to a new key as the narrator talks of the lovers inner flames and how he will die from loves yearning. Schumann conveys the sense of yearning by closing the song on the dominant, with no hint of resolution.
In Mädchen-Schwermut (Girls sadness), probably by Lily Bernhard, a girl weeps over her place in the joyless world. In E minor throughout, the songs melody progresses from repeated notes to a more passionate, arching shape in the second half, in which the accompaniment, too, becomes more animated. Schumann depicts the emptiness of the girls heart by abruptly stopping the right hand flourish at the end of the song, leaving only the open chord in the bass.
Mein Wagen rollet langsam (My carriage rolls slowly), by Heine, was also intended for the Dichterliebe, Op. 48. Schumanns accompaniment depicts the slow, uneven progress of the carriage through the forest, while the constantly descending voice part creates an atmosphere of low energy. In the second verse, three shadows come to the carriage and nod mockingly at the passenger; when they giggle and rush away the accompaniment becomes more animated.
[allmusic.com]")
