WQXR Webcast: Schubert and Brahms

This winter, on the first Wednesday of every month, New York City's classical music station WQXR has been webcasting recitals given by top-level Juilliard students performing live at the station's downtown studio, the Greene Space.  These recitals are almost always sold out but WQXR graciously keeps webcasts of the events archived on its site so that they can be watched at the viewer's convenience.  This month's edition features two South Korean musicians, cellist James Jeonghwan Kim and pianist Jinhee Park, performing works by Schubert and Brahms.

The program opened with Schubert's Sonata in A minor for Arpeggione and Piano, D 821 (1824).  What becomes of a masterpiece written for an instrument that no longer exists?  That's the question for musicians wishing to play Schubert's sonata for arpeggione, a strange hybrid of guitar and cello that went out of fashion within a few years of its creation.  Its idiosyncratic inventor, Johann Georg Stauffer, was a prominent craftsman of guitars in early nineteenth century Vienna, but he eventually went bankrupt after having neglected his business to instead concentrate on his musical inventions, all of which have since disappeared.  The sonata has since been transcribed for any number of instruments, most usually cello or viola, though I own a wonderful recording for clarinet performed by Richard Stoltzman.  Written at roughly the same time as the composer's String Quartet No. 14, the sonata was composed during one of the worst periods of Schubert's short life when not only was his health fast declining but his latest attempt at opera, Fierabras, had proven a dismal failure.  It was about this time that he wrote despairingly:

"Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy."

There is, however, little trace of these troubles in the sonata.  The opening melody, in particular, is one of the most tuneful Schubert ever composed.  Only in the heartbreaking second movement adagio does the composer turn inward to reflect on the misery of his current situation.  One hears here the voice of a man in torment.

The second and final work was Brahms's Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 (1886).  What first strikes one when listening to this piece is how youthful it sounds.  This even though Brahms was age 53 when he composed it and had already put behind him his fourth and final symphony.  That the sonata adheres to the spirit of Romanticism is at once apparent in the score - the second movement adagio is marked affetuoso and the scherzo passionato.  These are not the directions generally found in the works of an older composer.  And the turbulent opening passages of the first movement make it clear that Brahms will not allow the work's emotional content to be held in check.  The second movement in F-sharp minor seems at first more restrained as the cello accompanies the piano pizzicato while the former introduces the first theme, but from there the music grows ever more impassioned.  The work's only flaw is the brief final movement that sounds much too bright and perfunctory to be taken seriously.

Both musicians gave standout performances and James Kim also displayed a likable sense of humor in his remarks to the audience.  

Click here to go to WQXR's page describing the event.  There's another link toward the bottom of the page there that will allow you to view the webcast.