Brahms
Sonatas for Cello and Piano / Starker / Sebok

This vintage Mercury pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Sonatas for Cello and Piano Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1965
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Standard Operating Procedures

What are sonic qualities by which a record -- any record -- should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing -- or your money back.

What We're Listening For On Sonatas for Cello and Piano

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Powerful bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 1 In E Minor, Op. 38
Allegro Non Troppo
Allegretto Quasi Minuetto
Allegro

Side Two

• Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 2 In F Major, Op. 99
Allegro Vivace
Adagio Affetuoso
Allegro Passionato
Allegro Molto

Cello Sonata No. 1 (Brahms)

The Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38, entitled "Sonate für Klavier und Violoncello," was written by Johannes Brahms in 1862–65.

First movement

This movement is in a long-lined sonata form, opening with solo cello over chords in the keyboard, a melody that gains and loses in intensity and dynamics, and then passes to the keyboard, where the same general curve is followed without the same notes; the breadth and lyrical quality of this passage are characteristic of much of the movement. We pass from E minor through C major to a substantial second group of themes in first B minor, then B major.

This exposition repeats, followed by a development mostly of the second half of the opening theme's first phrase, together with a version of the insistent descending fifth (F♯–B, F♯–B, F♯–B) that had accompanied the last part of the exposition, building to a peak of energy, in which the cello makes two-octave leaps bridged by acciaccaturas against fortissimo variants of the opening theme, after which another theme (the B minor theme, the first theme of the second group) is heard and varied at some length, and the music, after another surge, dies away into the quiet return of the opening theme. (In performances, like the recording made by Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim, in which the opening songful quality is taken to mean that Brahms meant the movement for an Andante or even slower tempo.) The recapitulation is fairly regular, and the coda expands on the B major theme – now in E major, in which key the movement closes, directly setting up the V chord in the key of the second movement (A minor).

Second movement

Brahms' antiquarian interests, his studies of music from the Renaissance to the Classical periods, show in his work — he edited and helped publish a two-chorus motet by Mozart Venite Populi, he had a collection of sonatas by Scarlatti — and in his composition, his motets Op. 74, his interest in the fugue and the passacaglia (outside of organ music such as Josef Rheinberger's Sonata No. 8, fairly rare in the Romantic era), or in such pieces as the minuet of the String Quartet No. 2, and this one. It is generally quiet and often staccato. Characteristic of this section is the use of ornamentation that has a French baroque sound. The trio, of sinuous melody, features a characteristic figuration in the piano right hand whose top notes are constantly in unison with either the piano left hand or with the cello. The opening unison fragment of the trio hints at the parallel major (compared to the original key), before revealing the more unusual key choice of the minor-mode raised submediant (♯vi). A chromatic third relationship between the keys of a minuet or scherzo and its trio occur in only one other multimovement Brahms work: Symphony No. 1, in which the A♭ major third movement moves to enharmonic ♭III for the middle section.

Third movement

This movement is often referred to as a fugue. It is more of a sonata movement with very substantial fugal sections, however. The opening theme, which is based on Contrapunctus 13 from the Kunst der Fuge, does develop fugally until into the G major second subject group, a section which is much more conventionally, if wonderfully, treated.

The development opens with descending octaves — the first half of the fugato theme — under statements of the triplet theme which is its second half, in imitation between piano and cello. This leads to C minor, to an inverted statement of the fugue, to another episode-like section (bar 95, based on a part of the fugal opening first heard in bar 16; if this is not a fugue it is indeed very like) and after a brief section again in fugal imitation to a tense and tension-gaining section in true sonata style (bars 105–114, returning us to E minor, again based on the bar 16 figure) and a return to the main key, the second theme instead of the first, in triplets. After a repeat of the second theme, the opening fugato (what one calls a fugal section that's part of a larger movement rather than itself a fugue) returns, quoted in its entirety but staying in E minor rather than modulating to G, leading to the Più presto coda.

It has been suggested that a sonata by Bernhard Romberg also helped inspire this work. However, given that the Romberg work in question, his Sonata in e minor, op. 38, was originally published as a trio for viola and 2 cellos in 1826 and later arranged as a sonata for cello and piano by Friedrich Gustav Jensen c. 1877, this theory is untenable.

Cello Sonata No. 2 (Brahms)

The Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99, was written by Johannes Brahms in 1886, more than twenty years after completing his Sonata No. 1.

There are four movements:

• Allegro vivace
• Adagio affettuoso in F♯ major
• Allegro passionato in F minor
• Allegro molto

First movement

The Allegro vivace is a sonata form opening with a fragmented cello theme over a tremolo piano part. Its bipartite exposition somewhat unusually traverses F major, C major, and A minor; Roger Graybill argued that the tonal plan may be read as ultimately returning to F major, given the intricate motivic structure of its voice leading.

Second movement

Adagio affettuoso, with the cello part opening in a pizzicato exposition of the main theme over piano chords. The central section is in F minor.

Third movement

Allegro passionato in F minor, with a more songlike trio section in F major.

Fourth movement

Allegro molto; a rondo.

-Wikipedia