Cello Sonata in G minor Op.19 (1901)

However cautious Beethoven might have been about including a full-scale slow movement in a cello sonata - and Mendelssohn and even Brahms after him - Rachmaninov had no such inhibitions. The Sonata in G minor that he wrote for his cellist friend Anatoly Brandukov in 1901, just after his Second Piano Concerto, not only entrusts the cello with an expressive Andante but also challenges its prowess by setting it against an uncompromisingly virtuoso piano part. A big work in every way, it is most impressive of all in an extensive first movement firmly held together by the cello’s first two notes in the Lento introduction. The Allegro scherzando, with its demonic outer sections and lyrical middle section, and the Andante are comparatively short. The finale, to which the vigorous vivace coda was added as an afterthought, balances the first movement in breadth and dramatic intensity.

Two of the greatest sonatas in the cello-and-piano repertoire, Chopin’s and Rachmaninov’s, are by composers associated above all with the piano. Happily – since they might not otherwise have ventured into this highly specialised area of chamber music – both composers were on friendly terms with an outstandingly brilliant cellist: in Rachmaninov’s case it was Anatoly Brandukov, for whom he had written two short pieces nine years earlier and who was soon to be best man at his wedding. The first work of its kind by a major Russian composer, the Sonata in G minor is an astonishingly accomplished score that takes enormous risks with balance and yet emerges unscathed from most emergencies.

Rachmaninov, who gave the first performance with Brandukov in Moscow in 1901, seems for much of the opening movement to be restraining his virtuoso-pianist impulse. It is the cello that gives voice to the poignantly short melodic phrases of the Lento introduction and, although the piano introduces the vigorous rhythmic figure that is to animate the quicker main section, the two instruments share the main themes between them. As the Allegro moderato develops, the piano assumes a more heroic role but, except in an anomalous kind of cadenza, without undermining the authority of the cello.

The two middle movements are most resourcefully scored. While the outer sections of the Allegro scherzando are dominated by characteristically demonic piano writing, they also make effective use of the lower register of the cello which, anyway, has compensatingly melodious lines to sustain, not least in the eloquent middle section. If the slow movement seems less ambitious than one might have expected in a work written just after the Second Piano Concerto, it is no less lyrically expressive for that. The brief but passionate climax, where the pianist projects fistfuls of chords against the melodic line high one the cello, features one of Rachmaninov’s most successfully calculated textural risks.

The composer was apparently not happy about the finale, however. Certainly, between the first performance and the publication of the work he added a sensational Vivace coda to a rondo structure which, though dramatically conceived and structurally effective in its references back to earlier material, might otherwise have ended in an anti-climactic mood of contemplation.