Two Violin Sonatas Composed in the Same Year

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco concluded its 2022 season with a recital by violinist Sarah Chang accompanied at the piano by Julio Elizalde. The program was organized around two four-movement sonatas, both composed in the same year, 1886, by composers about ten years different in age. The older of these composers was César Franck, represented by his A major sonata. That sonata was preceded by the Opus 108 sonata in D minor by Johannes Brahms. Ironically, these sonatas were composed late in their respective composer’s lives.

In many respects the Franck offering was the more forward-looking composition. It presents a rhetoric that is more discursive than what one usually encounters in “classically structured” sonatas. This is particularly evident in the third movement, which is identified as “Recitativo-Fantasia.” Both Chang and Elizalde appreciated the many rhetorical twists in the sonata, providing an engaging account for the attentive listener.

The Brahms sonata is darker in its rhetoric. By the time Brahms completed the work, he was ready to give up composition in his old age. (He changed his mind about that about five years later after listening to the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, for whom he then wrote four pieces of chamber music between 1891 and 1894.) It would probably be fair to say that Opus 108 is more “about” darkness than about retirement. Here, again, the dispositions of the music were given equal measures of account by both Chang and Elizalde.

The sonatas were preceded by what might be called “overture music” by Béla Bartók. Chang and Elizalde played the violin-piano version of his arrangements of six Romanian folk dances. This could not have been a better way to warm up audience spirits. Chang particularly immersed herself in the Eastern European spirit of the music. Speaking as one that played the clarinet part in a community orchestra, I can assert that I could detect a few bits of improvisation to give this music its proper coloration.

Chang and Elizalde presented an encore that added to the cultural mix of the composers. The encore selection was written by Carlos Gardel, an Argentine born in France. His specialty was tango; and Chang and Elizalde performed his “Por Una Cabeza” (by a head, referring to a horse winning a close race). Al Pacino danced a tango to this music in Scent of a Woman, whose title has a musical reference of its own familiar to those looking forward to the coming San Francisco Opera season! Both Chang and Elizalde clearly appreciated the sensuous qualities of Gardel’s music, adding one more spice to the flavors of the afternoon program.