CD ECM Records Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin - Brahms: Sonaten Fur Viola Und Klavier

1997

Kim Kashkashian - viola
Robert Levin - pian

Johannes Brahms :
Sonate Fur Viola Und Klavier Es-Dur, Op. 120/2
Sonate Fur Viola Und Klavier F-Moll, Op. 120/1

Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin, musical allies for twenty years, focus their shared knowledge and skills in imaginative and moving performances of these 'late works' by Johannes Brahms. Written in 1894, just three years before the composer's death, these sonatas have often been considered as a link between the musical thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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'These late, autumnal chamber works have been shared equally through the years by clarinettists and violists, but in recordings like this, one sides with the violists. One of the best today, Kim Kashkashian gives the music a sense of subtext that reveals the wisdom and sadness of a composer who had a few years before he declared himself burned out. Her performance of the first sonata is excellent; the second one is outstanding, as she and pianist Robert Levin perform with a level of identification and spontaneity that suggest they're making up the music as they go along, living the tragedy along with the composer.' [ David Patrick Stearns, USA Today ]

'Brahms' third-to-last works, these sonatas are astonishing pieces looking back to the classical-romantic vocabulary he exploited and refined so fully while prophesying the structural and sonic freedom of 20th century modernism. These extraordinarily effortless and seamless works teem with emotion that is voluptuously abundant yet subsumed to the demands of a melodic structure that itself partakes of a sublime futurity. Listen, then listen again to grasp that one movement is a waltz, another a theme and variations, a third based on a country dance. Kashkashian and Levin perform with ravishing and egoless attention; they and their instruments seem to become the music.' [ Fredric Koepel, The Commercial Appeal ]