JANÁČEK  Violin Sonata

A restless, searching spirit suffuses this powerful work, which was started before and completed after World War I. In it, we hear the profound transformation that Janáček’s musical language underwent during this period; the resulting sound world anticipates his opera The Cunning Little Vixen.

BRAHMS  Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108

Brahms was in his mid-50s when he wrote the last of his three violin sonatas. Dark and impassioned, the music may allude to the platonic love affair Brahms had long carried on with pianist-composer Clara Schumann after her husband, Robert, passed away.

THOMAS ADÈS  Suite from The Tempest

In adapting Shakespeare’s Tempest for the operatic stage, Thomas Adès and his librettist, Meredith Oakes, took as their starting point “the traditional power of incantation in song.” That power is equally evident in Adès’s four-movement concert suite, which Christian Tezlaff and Kirill Gerstein premiered in Kronberg, Germany, in 2022—the same year the composer conducted the first performance of his Tempest Symphony in Dresden.

GYÖRGY KURTÁG  Tre pezzi, Op. 14e

These three aphoristic, spare-textured miniatures reflect Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s debt to Anton Webern. As a student in Paris in the late 1950s, Kurtág became so fascinated by the music of the Austrian modernist, whose works were unavailable in communist Hungary, that he went to the library and copied out by hand nearly Webern’s entire output.

BARTÓK  Violin Sonata No. 2

While Brahms sought input on matters both technical and artistic from the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, Bartók was under the spell of Joachim’s great-niece, the British-Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi, when he wrote his two mature violin sonatas in 1922. The two-movement Sonata No. 2 is among the composer’s most challenging—and spellbinding—works.