Thanks, everyone!

I still wanted to talk about the piece and our interpretation a little, because our take on it includes some ideas that I haven't seen in recordings. It just took me a while to do it because I haven't had that much time or energy lately, especially with long COVID not having completely gone away.

First, some background. Brahms’s two viola sonatas are his own arrangements of his two clarinet sonatas, which were composed late in his life. Brahms had already retired, but after hearing a clarinetist by the name of Richard Mühlfeld he was inspired to write several pieces featuring the clarinet, including both of his clarinet sonatas. His publisher asked him two arrange his clarinet sonatas for viola, and he arranged them so as to make them sound as if they were originally for viola. (In the middle section of this movement, for example, broken chords in the clarinet part are replaced by a double-stop passage that continues doubling the piano after the clarinet would have stopped playing.) Perhaps unsurprisingly for this stage of his life, Brahms’s clarinet sonatas have a reflective and nostalgic mood, even in the faster movements.

The pianist I performed with is also a ballroom dancer, and he immediately recognized the opening two-measure gesture as suggesting the gentleman’s side of a waltz: two big steps followed by four small steps. There’s never a waltz rhythm in the background, so our idea of the A section of the movement was that isn’t quite a dance, but rather the memory of a dance. At the very end of the A section, the dance fades away, the viola enters alone with a more vocal-sounding line – perhaps thoughts of longing or regret? – and then a 2/4 hemiola appears in the piano that, to us, suggested solitary footsteps walking away from the dance. It made sense to us to slow down the phrase a little to add weight to those footsteps.

In the slower B section, there’s a constant steady quarter note pulse that suggests a sort of procession. The viola enters softly, as if someone is singing in the distance, then gradually builds in volume and intensity before fading again at the end of the middle section. Perhaps this also suggests someone passing in and out of Brahms’s life?

The A section comes back with very little change: the first phrase ends a bit differently, and the final arpeggio and cadence is stretched out with all the note values doubled in the piano part. In our performance, we also stretched out the viola phrase leading into it, which I think emphasizes the image of walking away from the dance at the end.