German Romantic Chamber Music for Cello, Clarinet, and Piano
Sunday, February 9, 2025 • 2:00 p.m. • Maryville University Auditorium (Directions to the venue) • Free admission • List of Spring 2025 Maryville professional concerts
This recital will be our 2024-2025 Johannes Wich-Schwarz Chamber Music Concert. Please enjoy our pregame musical performance before the Super Bowl!
Artists
- Yin Xiong, cello
- Nicolas del Grazia, clarinet
- Peter Henderson, piano
Musical Program
- Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Cello Sonata No. 2 in D major, MWV Q 32, op. 58 (1842-43) (ca. 24 minutes)
- Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, op. 99 (1886) (ca. 29 minutes)
- Intermission (ca. 10 minutes)
- Carl Frühling (1868-1937): Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, op. 40 (comp. ca. 1900, publ. 1925) (ca. 26 minutes)
- Johannes Brahms: Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, op. 114 (1891) (ca. 28 minutes)
Brief Program Note
The nineteenth-century German composers Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms were strongly influenced by earlier musical traditions. Despite these creators’ orientation to the past, their works on the first half of this program could not be more fresh and energetic. Mendelssohn’s Second Cello Sonata is ebullient, and features a slow movement reflecting the composer’s fascination with J. S. Bach’s music. Brahms’s Second Cello Sonata is also joyful, but traces a more varied emotional landscape. Brahms’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano was one of several late masterpieces inspired by the Meiningen clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, whose sensitive playing spurred Brahms to end his first retirement from composition. Some years later, Carl Frühling produced a beautiful, lyrical trio showing the influence of Brahms’s autumnal, somber op. 114.