Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor

When Brahms first met Robert Schumann in 1853, he played him his first two piano sonatas. Schumann hailed his new young friend to be a genius, the next great German composer. The Piano Sonata No. 2 was composed in 1852, the year before most of No. 1, when Brahms was still a teenager. The first movement is full of turbulent athleticism, jagged octaves and gritty virtuosity, but the finest movements are the middle two. The “Andante” is one of Brahms’ earliest sets of variations, on an old German song, with gradually intensifying textures that culminate in the final variation’s sudden dramatic contrasts. The “Scherzo” follows without a break, at first seeming like another variation on the same theme—an indication of the young composer’s care for bonding together large-scale structures—before establishing itself as its own movement, complete with a tranquil trio section. The longest movement is the finale, prefaced by a slow introduction whose angular octaves are transformed into the main theme, and whose trills and scales return cyclically at the work’s close.