Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider & Robert Kulek

Contrasting Sonorities

Works for Violin and Piano

Richard Wigmore

When Ludwig van Beethoven composed his three Op. 12 violin sonatas in the winter of 1797–8, he had established himself as Mozart’s successor in Vienna, dazzling the cognoscenti with his improvisations and a stream of brilliant compositions for piano. Diplomatically dedicated to the court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, the sonatas are among the young firebrand’s most genially Mozartian works. Or so they seem to us. After hearing an early performance, the critic of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung complained that they were “… learned, learned and always learned—and nothing natural, no song … a striving for strange modulations … a heaping up of difficulties till one loses all patience and enjoyment.”

That exasperated critic seems to have been a member of the minority. By 1799, when the Op. 12 sonatas appeared in print (still with the traditional designation “for the harpsichord or fortepiano, with a violin”), Beethoven’s popularity extended far beyond a “fringe” group of aristocratic connoisseurs. Talented amateurs throughout northern Europe were now eager to snap up his latest compositions; and within a few years the sonatas had been published in Paris, London and several German cities.

Although Mozart’s influence is present throughout these works, Beethoven’s rhetoric, as ever, tends to be that much more emphatic. No. 1, in the violin’s most brilliant key of D major, is the most assertive of the three. After a trumpeting fanfare, the first theme sets a sustained melody, beginning with an octave leap, against a piano counterpoint in smoothly flowing eighth notes. The second group of themes begins with a lyrical recasting of the flowing eighth-note motif and continues with a dolce melody that turns into a modulating dialogue between the two instruments. In the development Beethoven works the two elements of the opening theme in ingenious new combinations, and then counterpoints the eighth-note motif (in the violin) with a variant of the trumpeting fanfare in an exciting build-up to the fortissimo recapitulation.

For his second movement, Beethoven writes a set of four variations on an ambling, folk-like theme. While the first two variations are decorative, the third turns from major to minor for a dramatic deconstruction of the theme. After this battle between the two instruments, the assuaging fourth variation presents the theme in shadowy outline on the violin against gently pulsing piano syncopations.

With its breezy 6/8 motion and off-beat sforzando accents, the rondo finale is first cousin to the last movement of Beethoven’s B-flat Piano Concerto. The first episode counterpoints a chorale-like theme on the piano with a skittish dance, while in the second, violin and piano in turn present a leisurely, Mozartian cantabile. As in the concerto, Beethoven reserves his most puckish inventiveness for the coda, slipping into outlandish keys before building a fragment of the Mozartian tune to a brilliant flourish.

Even people who, like George Bernard Shaw and Benjamin Britten, tend to find Johannes Brahms stodgy or turgid—“too much beer and beard,” as another composer, Paul Dukas, put it—can succumb to his three violin sonatas. With good reason: each one is crammed full of glorious, free-soaring melody, while nowhere else, except in the Violin Concerto, do we find the Classical thinker and the Romantic lyricist, the architect and the song-writer, in such perfect equilibrium.

“My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicability,” Brahms once informed his friend Joseph Joachim, for whom he created both the Concerto and the First Violin Sonata. Even allowing for the composer’s trademark self-deprecating irony, it is undeniable that a certain intractability is woven into the substance of much of Brahms’s instrumental music. Yet in his first two violin sonatas all seems effortlessly spontaneous: two instruments in tender and intimate colloquy, with the cantabile of the violin carefully balanced against the contrasting sonority of the piano.

Written in the Swiss resort of Hofstetten, near Thun, in the summer of 1886, the A-major Sonata, like its predecessor, draws on the private world of song. This is the gentlest and most concise of all Brahms’s chamber works; and as biographer Malcolm Macdonald has suggested, its serene lyricism may reflect the composer’s feelings for the contralto Hermine Spies, who spent that summer in a villa nearby. Living up to its tempo direction Allegro amabile, the opening movement fashions its second theme from the song Wie Melodien zieht es mir, composed for Hermine the same year. This leads to a more emphatic idea that in the development spawns a mysterious new theme in sarabande rhythm—a moment of haunting remoteness amid the music’s easeful lyrical flow.

Perhaps with a nod to the Czech dumka, the second movement alternates slow and faster sections: an Andante tranquillo in F whose decorous grace is faintly redolent of the 18th century, and a D-minor scherzo with a Slavic flavor—the only truly fast music in the work. On each of its reappearances the Andante begins in D major before gliding towards F, though it takes a final snatch of the scherzo in the coda to clinch the home key.

In the leisurely rondo finale, each return of the main theme (heard first on the violin’s rich, husky G string) is a variation rather than a literal reprise. The more impassioned second theme contains another, more veiled, song reminiscence: a yearning phrase from Meine Liebe ist grün, to a poem by the Schumanns’ short-lived youngest child Felix, which had so moved Clara when she played it.

In his late teens Dmitri Shostakovich was still undecided whether to pursue a career as a composer or pianist. The decision seems to have been made after the 1927 Warsaw International Chopin Competition, when he obtained merely an “honorable mention.” Thereafter he tended to perform only his own works, especially his chamber music, and wrote only fitfully for the piano. Between 1927 and 1932, when he was still viewed as something of a modernist enfant terrible, Shostakovich was immersed in “public” music: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, music for ballet and cinema, and his two operas, The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Immediately after completing the astringent, highly dissonant tragedy Lady Macbeth in December 1932, he composed the first of 24 Preludes for piano, completing the cycle on March 2. These pithy, often capricious miniatures—many of them lasting less than a minute—are both a retreat into a private world and, more distantly, an homage to Chopin’s famous set of 24 Preludes.

Like Chopin, Shostakovich arranged his Preludes in a cycle of ascending fifths, pairing each key with its relative minor—C with A minor, G with E minor, and so on. Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider and Robert Kulek perform four of them in an arrangement for violin and piano by the composer’s friend Dmitri Tsyganov, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet that premiered all but two of Shostakovich’s quartets. Prelude No. 10 in C-sharp minor is a nocturne that seems to cross the spirit of Chopin with echoes of Jewish folksong. The waltz-like No. 15 evokes both the ballet and the fairground, while No. 16 begins as a conspiratorial march for toy soldiers before the music stutters and fragments. For the final Prelude Shostakovich writes a quirkily playful gavotte that ends by thumbing its nose at all and sundry. Such youthful high spirits would soon disappear from his music for good.

Like the Cello Sonata he composed for the young Rostropovich, Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata was directly inspired by a Russian string virtuoso. After hearing Prokofiev’s new Flute Sonata, Op. 94, in 1943, David Oistrakh immediately suggested that he adapted it for violin. He even offered to advise on points of violin technique, to ensure that the transcription showed off the instrument effectively. The upshot was one of the 20th century’s most appealing and popular violin sonatas, premiered by Oistrakh and the pianist Lev Oborin in June 1944.

Although the violin writing in the transcription sounds utterly idiomatic (D major is the perfect key for the instrument), the sonata’s essential character—lyrical in the first and third movements, airy and capricious in the scherzo and finale—was determined by the tone color of the flute. The mellifluous grace of the violin’s opening melody (which Prokofiev had sketched before the war) is faintly curdled by “wrong-note” harmonies—a typical Prokofiev ploy. There are two further themes in an orthodox sonata structure (with exposition repeat), both with the flavor of a Russian dance. The themes appear in new harmonic lights in the central development; and the movement ends with a dreamlike echo of the opening melody high on the violin’s E-string.

The following scherzo is full of coruscating verve and virtuosity, the opening theme a riotous collision of duple and triple time, while the pounding rhythms of the second theme evoke a wild folk dance. In the contrasting central trio the violin spins a plangent, modally inflected melody against the piano’s etherealized bagpipe drones—a nostalgic vision of bucolic tranquility amid the horrors of war.

A similar sense of nostalgia suffuses the Andante, whose almost childlike main theme slips from F major to F-sharp minor and back again—another typical Prokofiev twist. The Russian spirit is most overt in the finale, though the main theme’s grace notes and arabesques temper the wildness with a certain Classical elegance. A second theme counterpoints violin acrobatics with what sounds like a parody of a piano exercise (the roles are then briefly reversed), while the violin solo of the central episode encapsulates the lyrical essence of the whole sonata.