Summer Concert 4: Juris Teichmanis & Danlin Felix Sheng

In the Musiklandschaften e.V. summer concert series, Juris Teichmanis and Danlin Felix Sheng will perform in the baroque church of St. Gallus in Merzhausen. The program includes the two sonatas for piano and cello by Johannes Brahms: the second sonata in F major, composed in 1886 on Lake Thun in Switzerland, is the master's late response to his melancholy E minor sonata, which he composed as a young composer in Bad Münster am Stein in the Nahe valley. A melancholy, autumnal composition in which Brahms makes use of Contrapunctus 13 from Johann Sebastian Bach's Art of Fugue in the final movement. Brahms deleted and destroyed an original Adagio, which Clara Schumann commented on with the words: "Cello and no Adagio - what a pity". While it was the lawyer and amateur cellist Josef Gänsbacher to whom he had dedicated the E minor Sonata, Brahms now had one of the greatest cellists of his time in front of him with the F major Sonata: Robert Hausmann, cellist in the Joachim Quartet and a hero with an equally powerful cello tone. It begins with concerto-like power in the first movement, only to explore the most subtle motivic transitions in the dialog between the partners in the following Andante. The opening with its pizzicato bass and the painful preludes is pure late Brahms. No Brahms piece is without a shadow: in Opus 99 it is the F minor Scherzo, a wildly moving, chasing piece that unexpectedly transforms into a sweet play of sound in the trio. The finale can then go its own relaxed way, songlike in theme, wandering in style.