BRAHMS CARL-OSCAR ØSTERLIND

Sonatas for cello and piano EMIL GRYESTEN piano

Cello Sonatas op 38 and 99 | Clarinet Sonata op 120 no 2, arrangement for cello John´s Hall, Kirsten Kjærs Museum (1833-1897) Sonatas for cello and piano

Sonata for Cello and Piano No 1 in e minor, Op 38 [26:09] 1 Allegro ma non troppo [14:09] 2 Allegretto quasi Menuetto [05:15] 3 Allegro [06:45]

Sonata for Cello and Piano No 2 in F major, Op 99 [28:01] 4 Allegro vivace [09:11] 5 Adagio affetuoso [06:40] 6 Allegro passionato [07:16] 7 Allegro molto [04:54]

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano Op 120/2 in E-flat major (arr. Østerlind) [20:29] 8 Allegro amabile [07:59] 9 Allegro appassionato [04:52] A Andante con moto – Allegro non troppo [07:38]

Total: [74:47]

Carl-Oscar Østerlind, cello Emil Gryesten, piano 3 ohannes Brahms’s father played the cello and passed his affection for the Jinstrument down to his son. Later in life, Brahms claimed to have been a good enough cellist to negotiate Bernhard Romberg’s first cello concerto. But his most notable contributions to the cello world would take the form of two sonatas for the instrument separated by 21 years. In both cases, the string parts demonstrate Brahms’s technical understanding of the cello while the piano parts reflect the sort of music he liked to play on what became his instrument of choice.

In 1862, Brahms had visited Vienna, making contacts he sensed might prove useful after his looming return to , where he expected to become director of the the Philharmonic Concerts. In the event, that job went to someone else and Brahms wound up staying in the Austrian capital. Here he encountered Josef Gänsbacher, a graduate lawyer who also sang, composed, played the cello and taught members of the Vienna Singakademie, of which Brahms would soon be appointed director.

Not only had Gänsbacher helped get Brahms the job, he had set his legal mind to securing the manuscript score to Schubert’s Der Wanderer for his colleague. Payback came in the form of Brahms’s ‘Sonata for Piano with Cello’ in E minor dedicated to Gänsbacher. When Brahms finished the score in 1863 and played it through privately with his colleague, it had three movements. Two years later, the composer returned to it, removing an Adagio and replacing it with a new finale. As published, therefore, the score contains no slow movement. Just as notable is the manner in which Brahms calls on his experience with both 4 instruments to create an equitable texture, anchoring the conversation around the central tessitura of the cello, the less powerful of the two instruments. In some instances, both hands of the pianist sound above the cello while the latter instrument provides harmonic structure.

In the opening movement, Brahms’s musical construction is clear to the point of severity. The Allegretto brings charm into the mix, but stays formal in its recollection of a courtly dance. For the new finale, Brahms lifts a theme from Contrapunctus XIII of Bach’s The Art of Fugue and subjects it to both sonata form and fugal counterpoint, writing the most elaborate fugue in his career to date. But it is neither dense nor a mere pastiche. ‘It is truly three-dimensional, more than just a fugue,’ says Carl-Oscar Østerlind; ‘there are places with a tranquillo marking, there are points where it dances, and there are moments of real beauty. It reflects the whole piece in its range of character.’

In its final form, the sonata was given its first performance on 14 January 1871 by Emil Hegar and Karl Reinecke. By the time Brahms came to supplement his first sonata with a second fifteen years later, he was a respected symphonist and conductor and a leading light on Vienna’s music scene. He was also significantly more experienced, even if that experience shows in a less than obvious way. ‘The second sonata is a lot more outgoing – a lot more youthful in a way – despite the chronology,’ observes Østerlind.

The music was written in the summer of 1886 in the Swiss resort of Hofstetten. ‘You have no concept of how beautiful and comfortable it is here,’ wrote 5 Brahms, overlooking Lake Thun, to his friend Theodor Billroth, who was the first to see the new score. The fresh air and expansive scenery evidently induced a blend of confidence, heroism and rumbustiousness in the sonata. As before, the instruments assume something like equal footing. But the technique here is advanced; the music’s more vital, animated conversation is founded on a different, fragmentary type of melody through which the cello seems to speak as well as sing.

That doesn’t preclude Brahms from imbuing his first movement with symphonic sweep, the cello leaping passionately around over a thrumming tremolando piano, both instruments shifting up a semitone for a mysterious development section in the black-pearl key of F sharp minor (the opening processional of the slow movement, and the Scherzo’s trio section, are cast in F sharp major). After the surgery on its predecessor, Brahms appears particularly keen to fully indulge the four-movement format in this sonata.

The slow movement sings out in anguish before finding some warmth, the cello exploring its full range after the doleful pizzicatos that eventually return. Some underlying darkness is carried through into the fiery Scherzo, by turns hard driven and delicately danced. The relatively brief finale is more overtly melodious, with that changeability of mood Brahms so often found useful in summing-up; here, the argument is built of both rococo intellectualism and long-breathed lyricism. ‘Brahms is a master of capturing those two sides – head and heart – at the same time,’ says Østerlind; ‘you need to play with all your heart and have the design of the piece in your head too.’ The sonata was 6 first performed by Brahms himself and the cellist Robert Hausmann, at the Musikverein in Vienna, on 24 November 1886.

In the decade that followed, Brahms came out of semi-retirement to produce a string of notable works inspired by the lyrical playing of the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. All of them glow with particular warmth – not least the Clarinet Trio and the Clarinet Quintet – but the Clarinet Sonata in E flat does so especially. It is the second of two sonatas the composer wrote for Mühlfeld and the last fruit of the late flowering the clarinetist prompted. Østerlind describes the work as ‘my favourite of any Brahms sonata for cello, violin or clarinet.’ It is, he believes, a score in which we sense the old Brahms looking back on his younger self.

Shortly after it was performed in public at the Saal Bösendorfer in Vienna on 8 January 1895, Brahms arranged the sonata for viola. But Østerlind went back to the original clarinet score to make his own transcription for cello and piano. Emil Gryesten’s piano notes remain entirely unchanged, but the cello’s tessitura necessities occasional shifts in octave. ‘The cello adds something to the music which maybe Brahms didn’t intend,’ Østerlind says; ‘but it’s perfectly possible to play this music with a modern cello technique and it sounds so good: with a broader sound than the viola that suits the music so well.’

The extent to which Brahms was inspired by Mühlfeld’s playing is clear from the manner in which the music pours forth, giving the impression of a single expression rather than a composite of three movements. After the cello sonatas, the mood feels less determined and more reflective, right from the ‘amabile’ 7 opening movement in which the inherent lyricism focuses material as well as texture. The solo instrument provides the bass note for the movement’s final chord, echoing its frequent underpinning role in the first of the cello sonatas. The temperature is raised a little in the middle movement, mostly as Brahms, characteristically, makes the music sway rhythmically either side of the solemn hymn that forms the trio section. The last movement takes that solemnity forward courtesy of a derivative theme, this one more broad and searching, which becomes the basis for dreamy, wistful variations – Brahms taking stock in the dusk of his life.

Andrew Mellor, 2020

anish cellist, Carl-Oscar Østerlind (b. 1984) is one of his generation´s most Dversatile musicians. He has been described by the Los Angeles Times as a “superb cellist” and was recently awarded the Danish Arts Council´s career grant “Den Unge Elite”. In 2010 he won the Danish String Competition and was a top prize winner of the “Ljunggrenska Competition” in Sweden.

Carl-Oscar Østerlind appeared as a soloist and chamber musician at festivals such as Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute, Piatigorsky Cello Festival, Verbier Festival, Ipalpiti Festival, Prussia Cove´s “Open Chamber Music” and Bergen Festspillene. As a concerto soloist, he performed in front of in Denmark, Sweden, USA and Mexico. Carl-Oscar Østerlind received many prizes and awards, among others the Jacob 8 Gade Award, Sonning Music Foundation Fellowship, Van Hauen Scholarship and awards from the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm.

As a chamber musician, he won the Danish Broadcasting Chamber Music Competition, The Netherlands “Charles Hennen Competition” and “Trondheim String Quartet Competition” in Norway. Østerlind worked as a solo cellist in the Danish Chamber Players, Ensemble MidtVest and Esbjerg Ensemble, and as a guest principal cellist in Copenhagen Philharmonic, Aalborg, Odense, Helsingborg, and Iceland Symphony Orchestras. He is a member of Messiaen Quartet Copenhagen and was founding member of the award winning ensembles the Sheridan Piano Trio and the Danish String Quartet.

Østerlind studied at the Royal Academy/Edsberg Institute in Stockholm with Torleif Thedeen, Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen with Morten Zeuthen and at University of Southern California in Los Angeles with Ralph Kirshbaum. Furthermore he received guidance from Frans Helmerson in Piteå and Hans-Jørgen Jensen in Chicago.

Østerlind currently plays a 1703 Giovanni Grancino cello, on generous loan from the Augustinus Foundation.

ianist Emil Gryesten Jensen (b. 1985) studied at the Royal Danish Academy Pof Music, Copenhagen, and at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, with further studies at the Como International Piano Academy in Italy. Among his teachers are prominent pianists such as Erik Tawaststjerna, Eero Heinonen, William 9 Grant Naboré, Dmitri Bashkirov, and Fou Ts’ong.

Emil Gryesten has received awards at a number of Danish and international competitions for young pianists. As a 15-year-old, he won first prize at the Steinway Competition in Hamburg and a gold medal at Berlingske Tidende’s Classical Music Competition in Copenhagen. In 2010, he won both the first prize and the Audience Prize at the Nordic Pianist Competition at Nyborg Castle. During his time as a student at the Sibelius Academy, he also won first prize at Finland’s National Piano Competition in Jyväskylä in 2010, and he also received the first prize at the Blüthner Pianist Competition in Malmö in 2006. Emil played his first solo recital as a 15-year-old and has since then had an active concert career both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. He made his debut as a soloist with as a 16-year-old, with Aarhus Symphony Orchestra. In the summer of 2018 he made his Carnegie Hall debut in New York.

Emil Gryesten has made a number of recording productions, both studio recordings and live concerts, for the national radio stations of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland as well as for the record labels Danacord, Classico and Dacapo.

Since 2017 Emil Gryesten serves as a member of the teaching faculty at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

10 SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Danish Arts Foundation Kirsten Kjærs Museum

Augustinus Fonden Solistforeningen af 1921 Pianoværkstedet Mattsson & McGehee, Aarhus

Steen Bjørnager John Damgaard

www.carl-oscar-osterlind.com www.emilgryesten.com www.rjonsdottir.com DACOCD 875