Brahms Sonatas

Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured. Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new. Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements.

These two sonatas, originally written for clarinet, marked the end of an intense period of depression for Brahms, during which his creative energies had all but faded. Kim Kashkashian, whose command of the viola unearths an even deeper realm of possibility in this already engaging diptych, faithfully captures the somber circumstances of its creation. In doing so, she shows that the viola is no less an instrument of breath, drawing from deep within her lungs the sheer vocal power required to carry across such arresting music.

Mullova and Anderszewski have thought through every detail of their interpretations - these are performances of exceptionally wide expressive range, from passionate ardor to the dark and turgid to the touchingly melancholic. Mullova and Anderszewski give a wonderful impression of having thought through every detail of their interpretations. Throughout the three sonatas I was impressed, not just by the way they do everything Brahms asks for, but by their evident personal involvement in the music.

Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel celebrate twenty years together as a cello and piano duet. It is hardly surprising that they chose to mark this anniversary with the music of Brahms, a composer who has been a constant on their beautiful journey together. Beyond his two ultra-romantic sonatas, they take listeners to an even deeper emotional realm, with his lieder, splendidly "sung" by the cello!

Start with the sound: Berlin Classics here offers chamber music recorded in a chamber like the ones for which it was intended. Israeli clarinetist Sharon Kam, along with German pianist Martin Helmchen (there's something that wouldn't have been so common until recently) and cellist Gustav Rivinius, performs Brahms' three late chamber masterpieces for clarinet in the Siemens-Villa in Berlin, not the studio it sounds like but a genuine villa in Berlin's swank Lichterfelde neighborhood.

Asked the question ‘How many sonatas for violin and piano did Johannes Brahms compose?’, many lovers of chamber music would probably answer three, and maybe also add their respective keys and opus numbers. When pressed, a number of them would also remember the so-called F.A.E. Sonata, a collaborative effort by the young Brahms, Albert Dietrich and their mentor Robert Schumann. But very few would probably think of the two Opus 120 sonatas, composed in 1894 for clarinet (or viola) and piano, but a year later published in the composer’s own versions for the violin.

This is the third period-instrument recording of Brahms’s violin sonatas I’ve heard, and by far the most illuminating. I admire the delicacy of Natalia Grigorieva and Ilia Korol’s playing on Challenge Classics, though not their choppy phrasing. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov are fleet, flexible and at times thrilling in their abandon, even if, in his ardour, Melnikov occasionally overwhelms his partner. Indeed, theirs are performances for the concert hall.

Three sonatas recorded by the young Yehudi Menuhin in happy times - particularly happy, as his younger sister Hephzibah is his pianist in all three. I'm not sure that he ever recorded the two beautiful Brahms sonatas again ; certainly not the Schumann, the quite unfamiliar second sonata. Its unfamiliarity is unmerited - Menuhin was bowled over by it when he came across it, and the performance is white hot, very committed though also fully under control.

Julian Bliss and James Baillieu present a recording Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet sonatas, Op. 120 and an arrangement of his 4 Ernste Gesänge, Op.121 arranged by Bliss. These late works were inspired by the great clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, without whom we would not have had this clarinet repertoire.