Sonata II in A Minor BWV 1003
J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

Bach's compositions for violin comprise a tiny fraction of his massive output of choral and instrumental works. Yet: all of his works for solo violin (and cello too) were composed in a very eventful six year span during his early thirties which he spent as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen. Since Leopold's musical interests were entirely secular,  Bach had a reprieve from his churc duties, and while at Cothen he provided posterity with practically all his non-ecclesiastical music, including "The Wel1-Tempered Clarvier," the Brandenberg Concertos, and his sonatas for both accompanied and unaccompanied violin and cello.

Bach is famous for polyphony in which many voices (melodies) interact with one another simultaneously. These voices had hitherto been assigned by him to many combinations of instruments and human voices. Even a single keyboard had the "players" ten fingers to accommodate the variety of activity, and the organ in particular had in addition to the player's fingers two heels and two sets of toes. Biographer Johann Forkel marveled at Bach's skill in accepting the limitation of ONE stringed instrument to produce "all the notes required for complete harmony,  rendering a second part unnecessary and even impossible.

Sonata II in A minor, like the others, has four movements. The first is marked "grave" but the performer is nor playing slowly.  Single measures have as many as 29 separate notes, several of which are thirty second and sixty fourth notes.  Annotator Shirley Fleming described it as "lyrical, broad phased, free in fancy and highly ornamented."

The second movement, a fugue. was called by Mattheson, a contemporary (and self-styled rival) composer, a model of its kind. He wrote, "Frequently the most excellent. working-out is found in a fugue on the fewest notes."  He was impressed that the subject of this fugue is eight short notes which are "fruitful enough to give rise naturally to a counterpoint of [considerable length].  Fleming wrote that the subject is characterized by "a half-step figure that is never lost in the contrapuntal web."

The third movement could have been a model for a Chopin  "raindrop" prelude. "A pulsing beat, in the bottom voice, runs throughout."  A song-like melody soars above. The finale has no double (or even triple),  stops,  but is in perpetual motion.  Biographer Spitta wrote  "it flies along in almost incessant semi-quavers" (sixteenth notes). British composer C. Hubert Parry wrote, "The works for solo violin unaccompanied may be said without exaggeration to be absolutely unique in the whole range of music.  There are no compositions of the kind by any composer whatever which have such scope and interest,  none that lend themselves in such a degree of the highest gifts of interpretation,  and none in which such an amount of noble expression and such richness of thought have been rendered possible for the single instrument."

Piano Trio
Maurice Ravel, (1875-1937)

In 1914, the guns of August exploded into World War I. That same month, Maurice Ravel was enjoying the summer weather at his beach home in Saint-Jean-de Luz, in the Basque area of southern France.  That August was the very month he composed his unusual, and memorable, Piano Trio which biographer Stuckenschmidt describes as presenting sonorities with "almost orchestral effects---because Revel spreads the construction over the many different registers of the three instruments."

The first movement could sound like a free-for-all unless one understands that the violin and cello are finding accents in different places, The cello keeps a familiar steady four plus four, while the violin divides the eight into three plus three plus two, an off-beat rhythm associated with Balkan (Bartok!) and Basque (Ravel's revered ancestry) music. The violin is given "especially virtuoso treatment."

The second movement serves as a scherzo whose "principal section is marked by very challenging writing for the violin, particularly in the alternation between pizzicato and bowed notes."  The trio section is a rhythmic duet between piano (a chorale-like melody of solemn broad chords) and strings, "a fascinating bi-rhythmic picture, with accents shifting within each measure."

The third movement is a form made famous by Bach, a passacaglia in which an eight-measure theme begun in the bass is the subject of numerous variations.  This one has ten variations which form a double arch: both a crescendo diminuendo and a continuous rise from bass to a high point (right in the middle) with a gradual return to the lower register, The biographer calls this an "effect of a ceaselessly increasing tension and its equally regular relaxation,"

"The unusually brilliant finale" is a sort of rondo with a "swinging rhythm" of mixed meters and "orchestral effects" amazingly produced by only three instruments.

With this Piano Trio, Ravel was clearly entering a new rhythmic world, just as historic events were changing forever the Europe he knew. When the war began, he volunteered and was devastated when the French Army rejected him for being underweight. He served honorably as an orderly at a hospital and later as a driver in a military convoy.

Piano Quartet in G Minor Opus 25
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

The composer's life was quite unsettled when what became his Opus 25 was being conceived:  he sketched it during his year-long stay (1859) in the quiet of the principality of Detmold, and he completed it on his return to his native Hamburg (1861).  Back in his home territory, he conducted a very successful women's choir, but what he was really waiting for was his appointment as director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Society.  When, early in 1862, the post was assigned to another, he never complained though he was personally devastated to be rejected by his own neighbors.  This "aching wound" surely caused his departure for Vienna which became his new home.  Soon after his arrival, Brahms played the first performance of this work, called by biographer Niemann "one of the most beautiful, grateful, and widely known of all the chamber works dating from the composer's early years."

The first movement begins with a brief, emotional, theme followed by a second theme described as "ecstatically soft and tender in its exquisite, yearning urgency."  The composer followed the traditional form but dealt with his themes in ways most unusual for the time. Biographer Malcolm MacDonald described this movement as presenting "an unusually large number of distinct ideas, linked by a complex network of shared motivic and rhythmic elements, in strangely fluid tonal perspectives."

The second movement, usually a scherzo,  he deliberately called Intermezzo, "a lovely, subdued dance on tiptoes in twilight, with the violin muted."  Its trio section is brighter and more animated "with rippling piano figurations"

The third movement begins slowly,  called "restrained passion" which leads to the mid-section in which all the instruments imitate a military band playing a march. These "rumbustious good spirits" set the stage for the finale which is a wild Gypsy rondo. One grumpy annotator called it "a clear aberration of taste" while admitting it is "an undeniably virtuoso tour de force".  Biographer Ivor Keys wrote, "It was obviously intended to bring the house down, and it did."

Program notes by Helene Gersuny