NOSPR Chamber Music / NOSPR Chamber Musicians / Brahms’ Loves - NOSPR

The cello and clarinet played a special role in Brahms’ music. As a young man, the composer played the cello himself, and it was for this instrument that he wrote two outstanding sonatas. The Cello Sonata in E minor reflects his fascination with Bach’s polyphony, sealed by a quotation from Die Kunst der Fuge used as the theme of the finale.

Brahms, however, had his prejudices and creative hesitations: he never wrote a solo concerto for the instrument, something cellists have yet to forgive him for. The charms of the clarinet, in turn, he discovered only late in life, when he heard the virtuoso playing of Richard Mühlfeld. So powerful was this fascination that Brahms returned to composing, although he had already taken his leave of it. Eusebius Mandyczewski, a musicologist and friend of the composer, wonderfully captured the essence of the pairing of clarinet and cello in the Trio in A minor: ‘it is as though the instruments were in love with one another’.

Adam Suprynowicz

The concert programme was conceived to mark the 130th anniversary of Johannes Brahms’ death.  

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