Wednesday, 12 March 2025
7:30pm
National Centre for Early Music, York
Tim Lowe (cello)
John Lenehan (piano)
PROGRAMME NOTES
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Major Op. 102 No. 2
​
A harbinger of “… strange new worlds of unearthly beauty”
Steven Isserlis (York Chamber Music Festival Patron) writes:
“… the very fact that there are only two sonatas from the early period, one from the middle and two from the late, makes the voyage through the cycle all the more extraordinary. In front of our very ears Beethoven transforms himself from confident virtuoso to supreme master of classical form, and then beyond that to a mystic exploring strange new worlds of unearthly beauty—a wondrous transfiguration.”
The Story
​
All five sonatas are important milestones from the first ‘thorough composed’ sonatas for cello and piano (the first sonata with a fully written out keyboard part), essentially the start of its repertoire, to twenty years later in 1815 when he re-entered the realm of the cello sonata. The two Op.102 cello sonatas are the gateway, the harbinger of ‘strange new worlds’ composed on the cusp of the so called ‘late period’. They come before the Ninth symphony, the late string quartets and just before the last four piano sonatas. The Op.102 cello sonatas contain elements typical of late period Beethoven including unconventional form, deeply probing emotional expression and experiential learning particularly his exploration of the fugue.
Beethoven returned to the cello sonatas in 1815 due to a fire. On New Year’s Eve 1814, the Russian Count Razumovsky’s palace burned to the ground. His house string quartet, the Schuppanzigh Quartet, losing their main gig, disbanded. Thankfully the disenfranchised cellist Linke was well-known to Countess Marie Erdödy, a Hungarian noblewoman, who for many years had a close, if somewhat stormy, relationship with Beethoven. Her financial support (alongside Gleichenstein) gave Beethoven an annuity that supported him throughout his years in Vienna. It was Marie Erdödy who commissioned Beethoven to compose for the benefit of their mutual friend, Linke. So from the ashes of Count Razumovsky’s burnt out palace came Beethoven’s Op.102 Cello Sonatas. From within his silent world - remembering that he was profoundly deaf – the mystic composer found music of ‘unearthly beauty’ welling up from the depths of what he called his ‘creative source’.
The Piece
Cello Sonata in D major Op. 102 No. 2
Allegro con brio – Adagio con molto sentimento d’affetto – Allegro fugato
The first movement of Opus 102 No. 2 is extremely compact and seems to dispense with anything unessential including any sort of introduction. It begins in great drama with its bold rising octave followed in the next bar by an even bolder rising tenth, we know that this is to be a major statement. A feeling of defiant strength suffuses much of the Allegro con brio; but a sudden hush and a drop of a semitone transforms the atmosphere and prepares us for the second movement.
​​
Knowing that he was writing his last cello sonata Beethoven finally seems to touch the cosmos with the only slow movement in the set of five sonatas. Steven Isserlis describes it as “…a prayer that must surely be the most beautiful movement ever written for cello and piano.” Beethoven remembering the acoustic properties of the instrument he could no longer hear - or perhaps re-imagining it for the purpose of what he ‘heard’ in his inner ear – invents a new sound-world for the cello, a profound dolce.
.According to his friend Karl Holz, Beethoven felt that: ‘A Requiem ought to be quiet music—it needs no trump of doom; memories of the dead require no tumult.’ Perhaps that was in his mind as he composed this prayer-like chant, with its gently consoling middle section. The movement nearly concludes in final, dark resolution, leaving a far-reaching question with no answer, but it does not end there. At the last second, it makes a turn and runs, without pause (attacca), into the finale, Allegro fugato. Beethoven gives us for a finale a powerful fugue—the first of the great fugues that were to become a regular feature of his late works.
Nearing the end there is a final surprise because the music fades away into the distant key of F sharp major, and then, as if from afar, we hear a new, unexpected motif. Steven Isserlis speculates it could be a referene back to his first occasional, piece for cello and piano, the Variations in G major on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus WoO45, composed shortly after the opus 5 sonatas. We might think then that Beethoven has come full circle rounding off his cello sonata series; maybe thinking as TS Eliot put it, “In my beginning is my end…” (“Four Quartets” Part II: East Coker).
From within his silent world Beethoven joyously says farewell to his cello sonatas. But more, he shows us a depth of humanity beyond music. “The conclusion of the fugue is exultant: we can feel the triumph of man over all adversity. This is surely Beethoven’s story—and the story of the human spirit as Beethoven saw it.” (Steven Isserlis)
Bloch (1880 – 1959)
Pieces from ‘Jewish Life’
Jewish Song
Supplication
Prayer
Bloch was born in Geneva and after training as a musician returned to his native city to work in his father’s clock-making/repair business, while sparing time for conducting and composition. After the First World War he went to teach at Mannes School of Music in New York and there he established himself as ‘Jewish’ composer. He returned to Switzerland in the 1930s but returned to the US when the Nazis came to power and became a much feted professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley. These three pieces are typical of Bloch’s music, which is redolent of Jewish culture and history.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873 -1943)
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor Op. 19
The Making of Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata
“…a journey of the soul”
Steven Isserlis (York Chamber Music Festival Patron) writes:
“The mystic aspect to Rachmaninov’s art can be felt strongly throughout his Cello Sonata, his most famous piece of chamber music. While there are no obvious quotations from any Orthodox hymns, the style of many of the themes, with their close intervals, their incense-filled colours, the passionate, almost obsessive repetition of single notes (particularly in the main theme of the slow movement), and the frequent bell-like sonorities, owe a huge debt to the music of the Russian Church that was such an important influence on the composer’s life.
Written in 1901, the year after the perennially beloved Second Piano Concerto, the Cello Sonata reflects, perhaps, the state of Rachmaninov’s heart and mind. Having suffered a nervous breakdown after the catastrophic failure of his First Symphony in 1897, Rachmaninov had fought his way back to mental and creative health. Surely it is not fanciful to hear an echo of this in the struggles of the first movement, with its conflict between semitones and whole tones; in the dark night of the Scherzo; and then in the blazing joy of the Finale? No bearded Russian priest with his Easter cry ‘Christ is Risen’ can ever have sounded more triumphant than the cello does as it announces the glorious second theme of this movement. The whole sonata, imbued as it is with the classical discipline that is so vital a feature of all Rachmaninov’s music, encompasses a vast range of romantic emotion—a journey of the soul.”
(with Steven’s permission from his recording with Stephen Hough (Hyperion CDA67376))
Early Life
​
The back story to the two aspects of Rachmaninov’s creative life – his reputation as the greatest pianist of his generation and the composer of wonderful lush, tuneful music – in a sense derive from his father who squandered the family fortune, sold off their remaining estate to pay off his debts and moved the family to St. Petersburg where Sergei continued his promising early piano studies at the Conservatory. Not long after the move the twelve year-old boy’s parents separated. Sergei reacted badly. But his maternal grandmother Sofia Butakova, stepped in to help raise the children, took care of household expenses and with a particular focus on their religious life, regularly taking Rachmaninov to the Russian Orthodox Church where he first encountered its distinctive liturgical chants and church bells, two features that later would appear in the sound-world he created in his composition. But at this time becoming a pianist seemed to be his destiny and on recommendation he was enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory to return to study with his previous teacher, a strict disciplinarian Nikolai Zverev. So in the autumn of 1885, he moved in with Zverev, as was customary at the time, and stayed for almost four years.
​
After two years of tuition, the fifteen year old Sergei won a scholarship and graduated from the lower division of the Conservatory to become a pupil of Siloti in advanced piano, Taneyev in counterpoint, and Anton Arensky in free composition. Increasingly drawn toward composition a rift grew with Zverev because the young composer-to-be wanted another piano so that he could work on his pieces. Zverev was furious. He was generally against his students composing too much, since time composing was time not spent practicing piano. He wanted to kick Rachmaninov out of his house, so the two of them went to visit Rachmaninov’s aunt, his father’s sister, Varvara Satina. She took his side and offered to house, feed and clothe him while he finished his studies at the Moscow Conservatory. The Satinas became a second family to Rachmaninov. Here the young composer encountered his first experience of girls, his two cousins. It was years later that his amorous feelings for Natalia Satina began to blossom.
​
During his final year at the Conservatory Sergei wrote a graduation piece in less than three weeks, a one-act opera Aleko based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies. It had a public premiere in May 1892 at the Bolshoi Theatre. Tchaikovsky attended and praised his work. Rachmaninov himself believed it was "…sure to fail", but the production was so successful the theatre agreed to produce it starring singer Chaliapin, who would go on to become a lifelong friend. Aleko earned Rachmaninov the highest mark at the Conservatory and a rare Great Gold Medal. Zverev, a member of the exam committee, gave the composer his gold watch, thus ending years of estrangement so it was that on 29th May 1892, age nineteen, Rachmaninov graduated from the Conservatory with highest honours in both composition and piano, and was issued a diploma which allowed him to officially style himself as a ‘Free Artist’.
The Disastrous First Performance of the First Symphony
​
His genius as a composer of lush Romantic music soon became apparent and one of his influences and champions of his music, Tchaikovsky was to have conducted another early Rachmaninov work, the symphonic fantasy The Rock, but he died before being able to do so. Rachmaninov was shaken by Tchaikovsky’s death and he became depressed. He accepted to go on a three month tour with Italian violinist Teresina Tua but he quit before it ended, sacrificing his fees. Before the tour, however, Rachmaninov had completed his Symphony No.1 (Op. 13), a work conceived in January 1895 and based on chants he had heard in Russian Orthodox services. He worked so hard on it that he could not return to composition until he had heard the piece performed. When it did finally appear in a Moscow concert series it was badly rehearsed and scrappy. Alexander Ossovsky, a close friend of the composer said that the deficiencies of the performance were largely due to Glazunov the conductor who made poor use of rehearsal time, partly because the concert contained two other premières. Rachmaninov’s cousin (Natalia Satina), said that Glazunov, an alcoholic, was probably drunk. The piece was brutally panned by critic and nationalist composer César Antonovich Cui but was not universally disliked.
Following the reaction to his first symphony, Rachmaninov wrote in May 1897 that "I'm not at all affected" by its lack of success or critical reaction, but felt "deeply distressed and heavily depressed by the fact that my Symphony ... did not please me at all after its first rehearsal" He thought its performance was poor, particularly Glazunov's contribution. The piece was not performed again in Rachmaninov's lifetime, but he revised it into a four-hand piano arrangement in 1898. Nowadays, of course, it is known as one of his greatest works, if nothing else a harbinger of what was eventually to follow. But at the time Rachmaninov had a nervous breakdown that threw him into a long tortuous depression which lasted for three years, during which writer’s block set in and he composed almost nothing.
Hypnotherapy and Falling in Love
​
By 1900, Rachmaninov had become so self-critical that, despite numerous attempts, composing had become near impossible. His aunt then suggested professional help from a family friend, physician and amateur musician Nikolai Dahl, Dahl’s treatment by hypnotherapy was successful and in a few weeks his composer’s block lifted and he started work almost immediately on his second piano concerto, ultimately producing one of his best loved pieces.
It should also be said that it was during this period he fell in love with his first cousin Natalia Satina. It will be recalled that after he left Zverev’s house the teenage boy went to live with his aunt and her family, which included his two girl first cousins. She was an accomplished pianist, which no doubt made her a sympathetic companion. Their desire to marry, however, posed some obstacles: it was against the law of the Orthodox Church to marry first cousins. The lovers got round this by marrying at a military barracks, because barracks priests reported not to the Holy Synod, but to generals. After further legal hurdles were overcome and the rather business-like ceremony, the newly-weds sped away for a three month honeymoon in Austria and Germany.
Rachmaninov completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 (Op. 18) during the period of his courtship and engagement to Natalia. It is not surprising then to find that his most famous and popular composition reflected the events of his life. It is full of passion, melancholy, yearning, and ultimately triumph, surely channelling the emotions that swirled around and in him at this time.
​
With his happy marriage to Natalia and the eventual birth of two daughters, Rachmaninov began to enjoy international acclaim as a pianist, conductor, and composer. Soon after the October Revolution in 1917 he left Russia with his family for Scandinavia. In 1918 they arrived in New York, where they mainly lived thereafter, though he spent periods in Paris, Dresden and Switzerland.
The Piece
​
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor Op. 19
i) Lento – Allegro moderato
ii) Allegro scherzando
iii) Andante
iv) Allegro mosso
The cello sonata dates from 1901 just after the composition of the second piano concerto. It was his next piece to which it at times bears a considerable resemblance especially in the piano part.
​
Rachmaninov dedicated the sonata to his friend the eminent Russian cellist Anatoly Brandukov They gave the first performance in Moscow with the composer himself playing the rapturous (and difficult) piano part. Brandukov had been Rachmaninov’s best man at his wedding and the two of them gave numerous concerts together. Because he believed both the cello and piano had equal roles to play in this work, Rachmaninov was not inclined to call the piece a cello sonata. Most of the themes are introduced by the piano, before being embellished and expanded by the cello. Few composers before Rachmaninov could have so deeply explored the cello’s capacity for expressive tenderness and intensity. Accounts of Brandukov’s playing highlight his beautifully nuanced playing which takes the audience to the heart of Rachmaninov’s emotional world. It should be specially treasured because never again did he write chamber music; a first and last borne up on waves of emotion that echo the intensity of its immediate predecessor.
The Piano Concert No.2 (Op. 18) and the Cello Sonata (Op. 19) are bound together by Rachmaninov’s breakdown, recovery and finding within himself a passion that eventually transcended all the circumstances of his life. Out of despair and love he wrought music of sublime beauty, encompassing a vast range of romantic emotion—a journey of the soul.