Gary Hoffman, October 2025

 

Program Notes by Elizabeth Morrison

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There are many ways to begin a season, and the first concert, like the first letter of an illuminated manuscript, wakes us to the marvels to come. Last September, the season got under way with an “American Night at the Opera,” an evening of jazzy, upbeat music from Gershwin, Sondheim and Bernstein, very much in tune with that moment of time. This year, the extraordinary cellist Gary Hoffman opens the season with an intense and moving program seemingly designed for today’s complicated reality. He and pianist Chloe Jiyeong Mun begin with Fauré’s Élégie in C Minor, creating a moment of introspection before Brahms’s great mid-life Sonata for Piano and Cello in F Major. Tom Stone then joins them for Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Trio in E Minor, the “Dumky,” a piece unique in chamber music, filled in equal measure with melancholy and joy.

Gabriel Fauré’s Élégie is a piece cellists carry close to their hearts. For many of us, it was the first significant piece we played, and its mixture of mournful, long-breathed melody and wild outbursts are part of who we are. As listeners, it might take us back to the memorable performance of Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 1 we heard at the end of the 2023-24 season. The two
pieces share a key and were written around the same time. Fauré’s emotional center of gravity is close to the surface in the quartet’s beautiful Adagio, and I was not surprised to learn it was his habit to begin each new composition by composing the slow movement.

The Élégie is so heartfelt that one feels it must have been written in response to a personal loss, and indeed the pedagogue Benjamin Zander declares confidently, in a master class on YouTube, that it was written following the death of his wife. In fact, it was not. Fauré composed it in 1880, three years before his marriage, intending it as the slow movement of a cello sonata that he never

completed. He went on to publish it as a stand-alone piece which he premiered in 1883 with the cellist Jules Loeb. Fauré may have felt that he showed his emotions too openly in his music. About his Requiem in D Minor he wrote, “My requiem wasn't written for anything–for pleasure, if I may call it that!" Pleasure? Well, artists can say what they like; the truth is in the music. The Requiem, like the Élégie, does not need to be attached to a particular loss; it speaks to the lacrimae rerum, the universal “tearfulness of things,” and so brings consolation to all grieving hearts.

We then move to the very different world of Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 2. This expansive piece comes out of the happy, productive summer of 1886 that Brahms spent at a resort just outside the city of Thun, in the Swiss Alps. In his 50s, Brahms had settled into the habit of doing his composing in the summer, at quiet resorts away from the city, where he could take long walks in nature during the day and relax with friends in the evening. That same summer saw the birth of his second and third violin sonatas and his Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor.

The lush, virtuosic writing of the cello sonata may have been inspired by Brahms’ love for the sound of a particular cello, that of Robert Hausmann, the cellist in Joseph Joachim’s string quartet. Brahms was known to carry certain sounds in his head: Joachim’s violin, his wife Amalie Joachim’s contralto, Richard Muhfeld’s clarinet, an obsession still to come. Hausmann’s cello should be added to the list; Brahms was to write his Double Concerto for Violin and Cello for Joachim and Hausmann the following year. Oddly, at this point in his life, having written hundreds of pages of music for strings, including all his symphonies and most of his chamber music, Brahms still felt insecure about writing for any other instrument than the piano. When contemplating the Double Concerto he wrote to Clara Schumann, “I ought to have handed on the idea to someone who knows the violin better than I do…It is a very different matter writing for instruments whose nature and sound one only has a chance acquaintance with.” Again, artists can say what they like, but there is no trace of insecurity in this masterful work.

The first movement opens, memorably, with tremolos in the piano, over which the cello enters immediately and forcefully. Within moments it has flown to the top of its register. The key of F major welcomes the cello’s lowest note, the open C string, and soon it too makes an appearance. The tremolos move from piano to cello, an exchange of colors that is almost thematic, a nod to the way the instruments can cross hands. The cello’s tremolo evokes bariolage, the baroque technique of creating color with rapid string crossings, and again casts doubt on Brahms’s alleged “chance acquaintance” with string writing. The movement traverses keys, including C major and A major, before returning sweetly to F major.

The second movement begins with two surprises. First, after the final F major chord Brahms moves the tonality up a half step to F sharp major. As you enjoy this heart-lifting effect, you might contemplate the very idea of a key with six sharps. Every note but B is raised a half step, leaving the cello without a single open string, and the pianist balancing on the black keys. It is not a common key, needless to say. Neither Haydn nor Mozart so much as dreamed of it. But Brahms certainly knew Beethoven’s 24 th piano sonata, one of his loveliest, dedicated to Therese von Brunsvik, and described by Beethoven as a “conversation with the beloved.” It might be going too far to call this an homage, but Brahms’s movement does share a rare quality with Beethoven’s: both are deeply romantic, but without a trace of sentimentality.

The other surprise of the second movement is that the cello begins in pizzicato. The notes are pitched low on the cello, and of course there are no resonant open strings in play. The effect is striking and original. In time the tonality settles to F minor, letting the cello’s resonance bloom, until the sharps return. We end in F sharp major, with more of those amazing pizzicati, like the heartbeats of the cello itself.

The third movement, nominally a scherzo, has the unusual title Allegro appassionato, and is in a very passionate F minor, with an F major trio. The last movement is a lovely, singing allegro in F major, surprising in its own way after the complications that came before. It’s clear from the writing that Brahms was happy in his Alpine resort, where he declared that “the landscape was so full of melodies one has to be careful not to step on any.” This sonata is certainly not an elegy. But when Gary chose to place it between Fauré’s Élégie and Dvořák’s elegiac Dumky Trio, one has to wonder what he sees beneath the surface. Perhaps this: there is a sense in which, once he was past 50, everything Brahms wrote was a sort of memorial. The future belonged to Strauss and Liszt, Debussy and Wagner, and by this time in his life, Brahms knew it. He was the last of a line that stretched back to Bach, and he mourned what would be lost, even as he himself took care to keep the line alive.

After the intermission Gary and Chloe are joined by Tom for Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 4, the “Dumky.” Written in 1891, five years after Brahms’ cello sonata, it is one of Dvořák’s most popular works, up there with his “American” String Quartet in F Major, which we will hear from the Pacifica Quartet on the next concert. It is also his most unusual. Instead of the customary four movements, it is composed of six sections, each one described as a “Dumka,” a Ukrainian word whose plural is Dumky. The first three Dumka sections are linked together and are played without pause, so they can heard as single movement. The fourth Dumka thus becomes something like a slow movement, the fifth becomes the scherzo, and the sixth, the finale.

 

But rather than worry about the formal arrangement, as Dvořák apparently did not, just embrace each new section as it comes along. Each Dumka is warm, melodic and entrancing in its own way. The word originally meant a thought or meditation, and came to be applied to a kind of folk song, a lament or elegy combining melancholy and exuberance. So the trio can be heard as a meditation on the psychology of loss. Each movement reminds us that sadness can only be sustained for so long before, inevitably, life itself breaks in. Over and over, this music brings us back from the shores of melancholy to the pleasure of Bohemian folk life as Dvořák knew it–surely what he intended. It was written just before he left to take up his appointment as music director of the National Conservatory of Music of America, in New York, and was composed as a kind of love note to his native land as he left it, possibly forever. He played it to great acclaim on his 40-concert Farewell Tour; audiences everywhere took it to their hearts. Now it’s our turn.

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