Brahms – The Complete Violin Sonatas

As shown by the opus numbers, the violin sonatas all come from his maturity and give off an unrivalled richness. Nevertheless, complete recordings of all three have tended to come along rarely, for some reason. They speak of the best of their time, and not just in music. I listen to them and think of writers like Eliot, Dickens, and Tolstoy – the complex textures, the depth of thought. They strike me as hard for a player to crack – not technically, but emotionally and structurally. There’s so much going on in all of them, that they confront musicians (both violinists and pianists) with an overwhelming array of choices to create a coherent shape. The musical coherence is the more important, but the emotional choices determine the individuality of the interpretation.