Paul Hindemith (1895 - 1963): Sonata for double bass and piano

There have been various tries to label Paul Hindemith and his music. Much of his career took place in National Socialist Germany, which provided a rich soil for speculation about his political views and led to underrating his work. A versatile instrumentalist, composer, pedagogue and theoretician was an easy target for categorization. 

Critics who have saddled Hindemith's music with the term "Gebrauchsmusik"- "Music for use" (Music composed for social or pedagogical purposes) could not have seen the world through the eyes of viola players, bass trombonists or double bass players. The "Music for use" filled a serious need. Not many musicians or music theorists have understood the true value of a real composer's real sonata for an instrument whose solo repertoire is only a fraction of that for the piano or violin.

The title of this work could as well be Sonata for Piano and Double Bass. Although the composer shows his profound knowledge of the double bass and uses the complete practical sound range of the instrument to the benefit of the thematic material, the piano decisively dominates the piece. The main task of the double bass is to define the overall sound world of the instrumental combination. Nevertheless, the skillful composer made the task interesting and rewarding.

The opening movement follows the traditional sonata form in an admirably compact way. The second movement, a scherzo lets the pianist reveal his expertise. At the heart of the sonata lie the variation series of the third movement, in which the instrumental responsibility is divided rather evenly between piano and bass. A recitative forms a bridge to the last movement, a naïve but hopeful ditty. 

A little bit of the history continuum: My Italian double bass professor, Franco Petracchi (b.1937) played the sonata to the composer as a young student. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958): Piano Quintet in C minor (1903)

by Folke Gräsbeck

When Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his Piano Quintet, he was no longer a young man, although the quintet is numbered among his early works. Vaughan Williams developed rather slowly as a composer, but eventually he created the most outstanding symphony cycle in Britain and continued to work actively way after his seventieth birthday. He composed the nine symphonies between the years 1910 and 1958.

Obviously dissatisfied Vaughan Williams recalled and hid quite a few of his early compositions. Luckily, he did not destroy them. Later his widow Ursula, granted individual licenses for performances and gave permission to publish certain works, including the Piano Quintet. After the composer withdrew the work in 1918 it remained unperformed until 1999. Yet, Vaughan Williams did recycle the melodies of the quintet in his Violin Sonata in 1954.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was also very interested in English Tudor music and gathered some 800 folk tunes from the period for his well-known folksong collections.

The ensemble owes its instrumentation obviously to Schubert's Die Forelle. However, the structure of the piece consists only of three movements, a plan also followed by Edward Elgar in his own Piano Quintet op. 84 (1918).

The opening movement Allegro con fuoco follows strongly a late romantic style in ¾ time. It contains several surprising contrasts, for example, the Andante sostenuto passage in Aeolian C- sharp minor/E major. A partly dotted, stoutly accentuated motif returns in each movement, serving as a motto for the complete composition. The gentle, atmospheric Andante movement in E-flat major contains turbulent animando passages. In the finale, Fantasia (quasi variazioni) the composer works further on the dotted basic motif in C major, but returns to ¾ time in a festive mood, also agitated by descending scales in the coda.