Double Concerto in A Minor

Brahms composed his Double Concerto as a gesture of reconciliation toward the violinist Joseph Joachim. The two men had fallen out after Joachim’s marriage collapsed and Brahms had taken the side of the violinist’s wife during the divorce proceedings. Anxious to heal rifts, the composer resolved to write a work that featured not only Joachim but also Robert Hausmann, the cellist in Joachim’s String Quartet, who had done much to promote Brahms’ two cello sonatas. The Double Concerto met with a rather cool reception following its first performance in Cologne in 1887. Yet for present-day listeners, initial criticisms that the work was joyless and unapproachable seem inexplicable, such is the wonderfully expressive and idiomatic writing for the two solo string instruments. The weighty “Allegro” opens in the most dramatic manner with a terse statement of the movement’s main thematic idea in the full orchestra, followed by an extended unaccompanied recitative for both violin and cello that builds up to a passionate climax. Thereafter, the work moves along more conventional lines, although the thematic interplay between soloists and orchestra is very much conceived in a symphonic manner. The other two movements are far simpler in design—a meditative “Andante”, featuring a gloriously warm melody played by solo violin and cello an octave apart, and a witty and occasionally sardonic Finale, its main themes displaying more than a hint of the Hungarian style favoured in so many of Brahms’ other works.