Felix Mendelssohn wasn’t the only member of his family who possessed musical talent. His elder sister, Fanny, was also a magnificent pianist as well as a gifted composer whose creative voice was unfortunately suppressed by the mores of her day. His younger brother, Paul, was an amateur cellist, and he must have been very accomplished on this instrument because Felix Mendelssohn wrote two cello sonatas for him—the first in B-flat Major (1838) and the second in D Major (1842–3)—that are highly virtuosic works, well beyond the realm of amateur playing.

Last season, we heard Gautier Capuçon play the Second Sonata; at this concert, we hear the First, which was composed at a particularly happy time in the composer’s life—immediately after the birth of his first child. It is a work of classical restraint, which shows off both cello and piano to fine effect but generally avoids musical and emotional extremes. Undoubtedly aware that it was written for two brothers to play, Mendelssohn’s friend Robert Schumann described it as “especially fitting for the most refined family circles.”

However, the sonata-form first movement opens with a little turbulence as cello and piano fling-out the principal theme, which twists disturbingly from an ascending tritone interval, the dread devil-in-music sound. But soon the music melts into lyricism and brilliant, rapid triplet passages for both instruments. More expansive and decisive than the first, the second theme emphasizes firm repeated notes with little descending ornaments. Mendelssohn uses both themes plus the rapid triplets to build an expansive and showy development section. The recapitulation of the opening music sneaks back in quietly in the piano under a sustained cello pedal, and the movement ends fast, virtuosically, and con fuoco (“with fire”).

Rather than a slow movement, movement two is a gentle intermezzo of the sort Brahms would later favor. In G Minor, its opening section is built around a little descending rhythmic motive introduced by the piano, and more of these crisp dotted rhythms energize its light and charming path. Mendelssohn moves to G Major for a contrasting B section, which is an ardent, heartfelt song for cello; the original rhythmic motive returns subtly in the piano to accompany it. The opening section returns, now sparkling with ornaments and cello pizzicati and taking on the character of Mendelssohn’s wonderful fairy scherzos. 

If the theme of the finale sounds a bit familiar, it is in fact a more lyrical, smoothed-out version of the first movement’s principal theme with the disturbing tritone interval cleared-away. And we will hear it a lot because it is the refrain of this sonata-rondo form. Here Mendelssohn tends to assert himself over his younger brother with an especially virtuosic and brilliant piano part for himself. But after all this flash and display, the music ends with surprising delicacy and modesty.

Pianist extraordinaire and radical innovator of the orchestra, Liszt did not venture into the world of instrumental chamber music very often. In fact, the two short works we hear this afternoon were originally written for other forces: Romance oubliée (“Forgotten Romance”) as the song “O pourquoi donc” of 1843 and La lugubre gondola (“The Mournful Gondola”) for solo piano. Nevertheless, Liszt’s reconceptions of them for cello and piano work superbly well. 

In the case of Romance oubliée, the composer wasn’t even originally thinking of the cello as his vocal stand-in. Instead, he created this for an unusual instrument briefly popular in the late 19th century: the viola alta, an unusually large viola invented by his acquaintance Hermann Ritter and used in Wagner’s orchestra at Bayreuth. This arrangement was made very late in Liszt’s career, probably in the 1880s, and it epitomizes the more restrained style he adopted in his old age. Its opening is bleakly austere with the unaccompanied cello singing a rocking, profoundly melancholy song which clings mostly to a very narrow range.

The magnificent La lugubre gondola is a memorial for Richard Wagner, Liszt’s colleague in the Music of the Future movement and ultimately his son-in-law when his daughter Cosima married Wagner in 1870. Renowned for his generosity to other musicians, Liszt aided Wagner immensely in his career and even staged the first performance of his opera Lohengrin in Weimar, where Liszt was music master of the grand ducal court. Yet the relationship between them was often stormy as Wagner repeatedly tried to cadge money from Liszt and sent whining letters that he was not supporting his genius sufficiently. For his part, Liszt tried to remain understanding; he wrote his mistress, Carolyne Sayne-Wittgenstein, that she must be gentle with Wagner because “he is ill, incurable. That is why one must only love him.”

In the winter of 1882-83, Liszt was staying with the Wagners in their home in Venice and working on a sacred oratorio. Suddenly, he was overcome by the premonition that Wagner would die soon. And he became fixated on the funeral gondolas with their heavy black draperies that plied the Venetian canals. He broke-off the oratorio and wrote the first piano version of La lugubre gondola. Only one month after Liszt left Venice, Wagner died suddenly on February 13, 1883 and was indeed borne away by one of those gondolas. 

In 1885, Liszt wrote a second version of Gondola for piano as mourning music for Wagner, and it is this version he adapted for cello and piano. (His own death would follow just one year later.) The introduction of the cello capitalizes on its poignant tone in the middle and upper register and its ability to conjure the sound of the human voice. 

As the music begins, the piano tolls the funeral bell, and the cello responds with an anguished lament, at first broken into brief fragments and then expanding into a flowing aria of great pathos, with the cello again quite restricted in range. The piano imitates the rolling waves bearing the gondola. The music dies away, exhausted by its grief.

Pianist extraordinaire and radical innovator of the orchestra, Liszt did not venture into the world of instrumental chamber music very often. In fact, the two short works we hear this afternoon were originally written for other forces: Romance oubliée (“Forgotten Romance”) as the song “O pourquoi donc” of 1843 and La lugubre gondola (“The Mournful Gondola”) for solo piano. Nevertheless, Liszt’s reconceptions of them for cello and piano work superbly well. 

In the case of Romance oubliée, the composer wasn’t even originally thinking of the cello as his vocal stand-in. Instead, he created this for an unusual instrument briefly popular in the late 19th century: the viola alta, an unusually large viola invented by his acquaintance Hermann Ritter and used in Wagner’s orchestra at Bayreuth. This arrangement was made very late in Liszt’s career, probably in the 1880s, and it epitomizes the more restrained style he adopted in his old age. Its opening is bleakly austere with the unaccompanied cello singing a rocking, profoundly melancholy song which clings mostly to a very narrow range.

The magnificent La lugubre gondola is a memorial for Richard Wagner, Liszt’s colleague in the Music of the Future movement and ultimately his son-in-law when his daughter Cosima married Wagner in 1870. Renowned for his generosity to other musicians, Liszt aided Wagner immensely in his career and even staged the first performance of his opera Lohengrin in Weimar, where Liszt was music master of the grand ducal court. Yet the relationship between them was often stormy as Wagner repeatedly tried to cadge money from Liszt and sent whining letters that he was not supporting his genius sufficiently. For his part, Liszt tried to remain understanding; he wrote his mistress, Carolyne Sayne-Wittgenstein, that she must be gentle with Wagner because “he is ill, incurable. That is why one must only love him.”

In the winter of 1882-83, Liszt was staying with the Wagners in their home in Venice and working on a sacred oratorio. Suddenly, he was overcome by the premonition that Wagner would die soon. And he became fixated on the funeral gondolas with their heavy black draperies that plied the Venetian canals. He broke-off the oratorio and wrote the first piano version of La lugubre gondola. Only one month after Liszt left Venice, Wagner died suddenly on February 13, 1883 and was indeed borne away by one of those gondolas. 

In 1885, Liszt wrote a second version of Gondola for piano as mourning music for Wagner, and it is this version he adapted for cello and piano. (His own death would follow just one year later.) The introduction of the cello capitalizes on its poignant tone in the middle and upper register and its ability to conjure the sound of the human voice. 

As the music begins, the piano tolls the funeral bell, and the cello responds with an anguished lament, at first broken into brief fragments and then expanding into a flowing aria of great pathos, with the cello again quite restricted in range. The piano imitates the rolling waves bearing the gondola. The music dies away, exhausted by its grief.

“Even as the UK is brimming with wonderful young composers, I think few would dispute that Tom Adès may be the most extravagantly gifted of them all.”
 – Sir Simon Rattle

No composer before the public today has had as rapid a rise to well-deserved fame as has England’s Thomas Adès. Sometimes sardonically called “Tom Terrific” by envious musical rivals, he is an extraordinarily gifted conductor and pianist as well as a composer whose every work is awaited with the keenest anticipation throughout Europe and increasingly in the United States. He seems equally adept at creating masterpieces in any musical genre, including Arcadiana, an exquisite string quartet he wrote at age twenty-three; Powder Her Face, an edgy, sexually liberated chamber opera written a year later; and Asyla (1997, age twenty-six), a searing, brilliant tone poem for large orchestra, which Sir Simon Rattle chose as his first piece to perform when he became Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002. In 2000, Adès became the youngest composer ever to win the extremely prestigious Grawemeyer Award in composition. In 2004, his Shakespearian opera The Tempest was premiered to sold-out audiences at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and will be presented by the Metropolitan Opera during the 2012–13 season.

Adès’ extreme precocity and technical brilliance have led many to compare him with Benjamin Britten, and indeed from 1999 to 2008, he was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten founded; Adès also holds the Britten Chair in Composition at London’s Royal College of Music. His superb pianistic skills have led him, like Britten with the singer Peter Pears, to form successful performing partnerships with tenor Ian Bostridge and cellist Steven Isserlis. Yet Adès is a very different composer from Britten—far less traditional and more modern in his musical language, more attuned to the popular world around him, and more extroverted in expression.

Lieux retrouvés was jointly commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Carnegie Hall and received its world premiere with Isserlis and Adès at the piano at Aldeburgh on June 21, 2009. For its Carnegie Hall performance, Harry Haskell wrote, “The title Lieux retrouvés (“Rediscovered Places”) suggests a kind of musical travelogue whose four movements evoke in-turn the spirit of the waters, the mountains, the fields, and the city. . . . Adès’s stylistic fingerprints are clearly audible in the work’s richly imaginative sonorities and complex, multi-layered rhythms. On a deeper level, the densely packed motivic structure recalls the sound world of Janác˘ek and Bartók.”

Reviewing that performance, Anthony Tommassini of The New York Times commented. “The purely musical elements of the work are what grabbed me: the rippling figures for piano and cello that spin out in crazed, cyclic riffs; the crystalline piano harmonies that sound as if the wind were rustling the chimes in the pagoda; the feisty, industrialized propulsive bursts in the finale.” And Justin Davidson wrote in New York, “Toward the end of the third movement, the piano texture thins out to single tolling high notes, and the cello slides up the register to a hushed, poignant whistle. Close your eyes, and you might almost think you were hearing someone gliding a moist finger around the rim of a water glass, just before a finale full of wild, euphoric glissandos. It’s a moment of tender genius, the product of a fanciful and tragic sensibility.”

A late bloomer as a composer, César Franck created all the works for which he is remembered during the last decade-and-a-half of his life, including his famous Symphony in D Minor and the exquisite Violin Sonata we hear this afternoon in a version for cello. It was written during the summer of 1886 as a wedding present for Franck’s countryman Eugène Ysaye, one of the legendary violin virtuosos of the 19th century. Premiered by Ysaye in Brussels on December 16, 1886, it was a success from the beginning and ranks today as one of the most popular of all violin sonatas, as well as one of the masterpieces of the French chamber music repertoire. That very popularity inspired Franck’s colleague the prominent French cellist Jules Delsart to arrange it for his own instrument.

Like Liszt and Schumann, Franck gravitated in many of his works to a compositional approach known as “cyclical form.” This technique introduces a basic melodic idea or theme, also known as a “motto,” at the beginning of the piece and then transforms it into related melodies (Franck referred to them as “cousins”) recurring throughout the work. In the Sonata, the motto idea is a simple motive rocking-up-and down on the interval of a third, which the cello sings as it enters.

Sounding more like an inner movement than a traditional opening movement, the lovely, quizzical first movement, undulating gently in 9/8 time, creates an original, understated beginning. It is also unusual in that it mostly evades the home key of A Major, opting instead for an ambiguous tonality. On its entrance, the cello introduces the rocking motto idea and expands it into a beguiling melody. The piano presents the rhapsodic descending second theme, but the cello always prefers to shift back to its opening melody. Without any development, all this music reprises, with the cello’s melody rising to passionate heights.

If the tone of the first movement was surprising, the bold and energetic second movement in D Minor is a perfect example of a first-movement sonata form. It explodes with passionate fervor as the piano introduces a stormy principal theme marked by off-the-beat phrasing and turbulent chromaticism. This surges into the second theme, led by the cello—a new version of the rocking motto idea urged-on by the impetuous piano. The tempo finally slows and the volume drops for the movement’s most remarkable passage as the cello sings a hauntingly sad melody, rising and falling in great sweeps over a wide range. A brief but highly dramatic development section flows directly into the recapitulation, the cello now carrying the stormy principal theme.

To open the free-form Recitativo-Fantasia, the piano returns to the rocking motto idea, now in pensive chords. The cello responds with a flowing, improvisatory recitative mimicking an operatic tenor in full cry. Midway through this movement, over the piano’s caressing arpeggios, the cello introduces a pair of new melodies that will play important roles in the finale. The gentle first one stretches the motto’s rising third interval to a fourth, while the second is much more dramatic, with the cello plunging downward before soaring heroically upward. This music grows very impassioned before the movement closes softly and moodily.

With its sweetly appealing melody sung by the piano and cello in canon, the finale is the Sonata’s best-loved movement. This theme returns over and over, always in different keys, as the refrain of this sonata-rondo form. The first episode brings back the gentle theme from movement three in the piano, while the cello swirls freely around it; later it reappears in the cello. During the middle development episode, its heroic partner also returns, played with great power by the cello. Ultimately, though, the sweetly singing canon theme carries the movement to its passionate, heartwarming conclusion.