Jean-Guihen Queyras & Alexander Melnikov

In 1815, Ludwig van Beethoven was in a creative crisis. He particularly suffered from the increasingly dramatic loss of his hearing: “[I] am more sensitive to many things than all other people, and with the torment of my hearing, I often find only pain in the company of other people,” he lamented to his friend Joseph Xaver Brauchle. A way out of the crisis ultimately came from composing chamber music. The two sonatas for cello, Op. 102, were created in the summer of 1815. Beethoven dedicated them to his long-time supporter Anna-Maria Erdödy and Joseph Linke, the cellist of the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The two sonatas, which, due to their contrapuntal character, suggest Beethoven's intense study of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at that time, mark the beginning of his late works. A hundred years after Beethoven, Claude Debussy also began working on a cycle of sonatas inspired by French Baroque music. The cello sonata contained within it shares little in common with the classical sonata form: the three movements have free forms and poetic titles. Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff's romantic cello sonata from 1901 combines lush cantilenas with classical formal principles and some idiosyncratic twists.

Program
Ludwig van Beethoven // 1770–1827
Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 4 in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1 // 1815
Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 5 in D Major, Op. 102, No. 2 // 1815
Intermission
Claude Debussy // 1862–1918
Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, L. 135 // 1915
Sergei Rachmaninoff // 1873–1943
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor, Op. 19 // 1901

Performers
Jean-Guihen Queyras | Cello
Alexander Melnikov | Piano