Ria Kang in Recital

In a keyboard part copied in 1725, the title of Bach’s six sonatas names the keyboard first: six sonatas for obbligato harpsichord and solo violin, with a bass for viola da gamba to be added if desired. The order matters. In most sonatas of the period the keyboard player improvised chords above a written bass line. Here Bach wrote out every note of the right hand, turning the keyboard into a full melodic partner. With the bass in the player’s left hand, two musicians produce three independent voices, the texture of a trio sonata.

The sonatas probably took shape during Bach’s last years as Kapellmeister at Köthen, before he moved to Leipzig in 1723, and he kept refining them for decades. The A-major sonata is among the most openly lyrical of the set. Its gently rocking first movement, in 6/8, is built on imitation: a melody introduced by one voice is taken up by the next. The Allegro that follows is quick and outgoing, an animated exchange between the players. In the Andante un poco, in F-sharp minor, violin and keyboard trace the same melody in canon above an unbroken current of sixteenth notes in the bass, one voice following the other like two singers sharing a song. The Presto restores the brightness of A major.

Half a century later, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote that these trios still sounded very good although they were more than fifty years old, and that some of their slow movements could hardly be written more melodiously even in his own day. In this recital the keyboard part is played on the modern piano.

Pablo de Sarasate was one of the most celebrated violinists of the nineteenth century, admired across Europe for the purity of his tone and an ease of technique that seemed to make difficulty disappear. He began as a prodigy: after performing in public as a young child, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its first prize for violin in 1857, at the age of thirteen.

In 1877, on his first concert tour of Germany, Sarasate met the Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock, who had already published Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and now asked him for a set of Spanish ones. The result was eight Spanish Dances, issued in four books between 1878 and 1882. The Malagueña, which opens the first book, is dated in Sarasate’s hand “Berlin le 2 février 1878” and playfully signed “Pablito.”

A malagueña is a song and dance of Málaga, in Andalusia, and Sarasate captures its character in miniature: a supple, singing melody, decorated with turns, slides, and quick flourishes, above a gently swaying accompaniment. The challenge for the violinist is to make the ornament sound spontaneous, as if a singer were improvising in the moment.

Sarasate dedicated the first book to Joseph Joachim, whom he had met in Berlin in December 1877. The two represented opposing schools of violin playing, yet Joachim wrote to thank him for the dedication.

Max Bruch was twenty-six and living in Mannheim when he began his first violin concerto in the summer of 1864. Not a violinist himself, he sought the advice of string players as the work took shape, above all the great violinist Joseph Joachim. The concerto was first heard in Koblenz on April 24, 1866, with Otto von Königslöw as soloist and Bruch conducting. Unsatisfied, Bruch withdrew it for revision.

Joachim’s response, sent that August, was encouraging and practical. He found the piece thoroughly idiomatic for the instrument, and at his suggestion the first two movements, until then separate, were joined into one continuous span. When Bruch wondered whether a work so free in form should be called a concerto at all, Joachim assured him that the title was apt; Bruch nonetheless named the opening movement Vorspiel, or Prelude. Rather than laying out themes in the traditional way, it alternates rhapsodic solo passages with full-voiced outbursts and leads without a break into the Adagio, the emotional center of the work. The Finale, Allegro energico, is launched by a vigorous theme in double stops and drives to a brilliant close.

Joachim gave the first performance of the revised concerto in Bremen on January 7, 1868, and it has never left the repertoire. Its success became a burden to its composer. Having sold the work outright to his publisher, Bruch earned nothing from its popularity, and in later years he complained that violinists wanted to play only his first concerto. His autograph score is now in the Morgan Library & Museum, here in New York.

In the years before the First World War, Béla Bartók traveled through the villages of Hungary and Transylvania with notebooks and a phonograph, collecting thousands of songs and dance tunes from Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak musicians. His Romanian Folk Dances, composed for piano in 1915, draw on seven of those melodies, played for him between 1910 and 1912 by village fiddlers, a pair of Romani violinists, and a peasant flute player. Bartók kept the tunes themselves unaltered and framed them with harmonies of his own.

The six dances pass quickly, each with its own character: the Stick Dance, firm and emphatic; the Sash Dance, quick and light; In One Spot, hushed and strange; the Dance from Bucium, with its lilting melody; the Romanian Polka, with its shifting, off-balance meter; and the Fast Dance, which races through two tunes to a brilliant finish.

Bartók wrote the piano original without octaves, so that small hands could play it. The violinist Zoltán Székely, a close friend and later the dedicatee of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, made the arrangement heard in this recital in 1925 and first performed it that year with the composer at the piano. Bartók spent his last years in New York, where he died in 1945.