Classical Music | Cello Music

Recorded on 05/15/2013, uploaded on 11/14/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Written in 1932, Barber’s Cello Sonata is an early work written in the composer’s final year of study at the Curtis Institute of Music. However, it is by no means a student work as it displays his hallmark lyrical and dramatic style within meticulously interwoven piano and cello lines. In three movements, the sonata sandwiches a mostly playful scherzando within two stormy outer movements. The first movement features both an agitato rising first theme built on a leaping motive that is incessantly passed between cello and piano, and a heart-on-sleeve second theme that contrasts the brooding temperament that pervades the work as a whole. The aptly named Allegro appassionato third movement explodes with a rhapsodic opening theme in the piano (later taken by the cello) that is written out in such a way as to sound declaimed and almost improvised. The finale ultimately builds to a feverish climax that concludes with emphatic chords in both instruments.      Yves Dharamraj

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.