A pioneering set of Urtext editions.String editions include an Urtext solo part and a second part with fingering as well as performance markings.Each edition offers a preface on performance practice aspects pertaining to the respective works.A separate text booklet includes pioneering texts on general issues of performance practice in the 19th century as well as on specific issues with regard to Johannes Brahms chamber music.Bärenreiter s pioneering new scholarly-critical editions of Brahms works for one instrument and Piano are edited by a team of musicologists who are also performers. They offertoday s musicians not just a reliable musical text based on all known sources but also a comprehensive approach to the works which aims to place them in their historical context and to elucidate the complex of meanings that the composer wished his notation to convey to performers.The Violin and Viola sonata editions come not only with an Urtext part freed from all editorial emendations but also with an additional part including fingering and bowing based on the practices of Joseph Joachim and his colleagues. These markings especially draw on publications of the sonatas edited by Joachim s pupils Leopold Auer and Ossip Schnirlin as well as those by Brahms associate Franz Kneisel. A similar approach has been used for the Violoncello sonatas drawing on performance markings by Robert Hausmann (for whom Brahms wrote the Sonata in F major) Hugo Becker with whom Brahms performed it and Julius Klengel who was also close to his circle.
SKU: BR.EB-9441
ISBN 9790004189184. 9 x 12 inches.
The two sonatas of Johannes Brahms's op. 120 are widely hailed as crowning points of the repertoire for clarinet and piano. Moreover, in the version for viola and piano arranged by Brahms himself, they rank among the most frequently played viola works of the 19th century. They far surpass in compositional substance the relatively few original sonatas written for these instrumentations during the same period.Of the two fellow works, the Sonata No. 2 in E flat major is the more accessible. Diverging from the classical-romantic tradition, Brahms used the key of E flat major here not to express the heroic or monumental, but to obtain lyrical, chiefly restrained characterizations. The serenade-like beauty of the principal theme, which opens the sonata, has always been particularly admired. In his review of the world premiere, the renowned Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, a friend of Brahms's, raves with the words it was as if it had fallen from the Heavens. The closing set of variations also follows with gentle gracefulness this lyrical character. However, the middle movement, with its tempestuous outer sections in E flat minor and the hymnic trio in B major provides a passionate and serious contrast, which allows the flanking idyll to unfold its beauties all the more insistently.
SKU: BR.EB-9440
ISBN 9790004189177. 9 x 12 inches.