Johannes Brahms, Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin

The two Sonatas op. 120 are among the last chamber works of Johannes Brahms, written in 1894, three years before his death. He composed them for the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld and provided an alternative viola part himself. On this album violist Kim Kashkashian and pianist Robert Levin play the viola version, and they treat these autumnal pieces as music that already looks ahead from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

Kashkashian and Levin had been playing together for some twenty years when they made this record. Their earlier work for ECM New Series includes the duo album Elegies and the complete Hindemith viola sonatas, the set that a reviewer in Stereoplay credited with establishing Kashkashian among the leading violists. The Brahms sonatas were recorded in November 1996 in the Mozart-Saal of the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The booklet essay is by Lotte Thaler.

The disc opens with the Sonata No. 2 in E flat major, whose first movement, marked Allegro amabile, sets the gentle, conversational tone of the whole programme. Its finale, an Andante con moto, is a set of variations. The Sonata No. 1 in F minor follows, darker and more searching in its opening Allegro appassionato. Its Andante un poco Adagio is the emotional centre of the record, a long singing line that Kashkashian shapes like a voice while Levin keeps the piano part light. The F minor sonata ends with a Vivace of real brightness. The viola's narrower range forced Brahms to rewrite parts of the clarinet line, and the darker string colour changes the character of both works.

Critics responded warmly. In USA Today David Patrick Stearns called Kashkashian "one of the best today" and found the second sonata outstanding, played as if the two musicians were "making up the music as they go along". Fredric Koepel in The Commercial Appeal wrote that they "perform with ravishing and egoless attention". Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo singled out the slow movement of the F minor sonata as the finest stretch of the album, and praised Levin as an ideal partner.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1630, first released in September 1997.