• Sonata no 2. op.81 - Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950)
•     Allegro moderato 
•     Andante cantabile 
•     Allegro con spirito

 
• Sonata - Elliott Carter (born 1908)
•     Moderato (tempo giusto) 
•     Vivace, molto leggiero 
•     Adagio
•     Allegro

 
• Sonata - Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) 
•     Allegro - Tempo di Marcia 
•     Cavatine 
•     Ballabile 
•     Finale 

A greater contrast between sonatas would be hard to find in any fragment of time, but it seems amazing to me that Nikolay Myaskovsky, Elliott Carter and Francis Poulenc should all have written cello sonatas in the same year, 1948. These three major composers, at very different stages in their lives and careers, with vastly different cultural and political backgrounds, chose the sonata as their framework with dramatically different results.

I think of these works as three conversational types. Myaskovsky's conversation is a formal, polite, refined and serious dialogue, each partner having his turn to speak. Poulenc's duettists however keep up a constant, witty banter. They never stop chatting, very fast, very fluent, and yet managing never to talk at the same time! The 'chat' is conducted largely over coffee and Pernod at a boulevard café in the heart of Paris, with city life hustling and bustling about them. Carter's two players bring a whole new concept to the art of conversation. They appear to follow quite independent thoughts and discussions, maintaining parallel conversations, cheerfully oblivious of one another at times but also astonishingly in tune with each other's wavelength. 

The contrast between the three works arises not so much because Carter was extreme in his ideas, but because Myaskovsky was so obviously looking back to the sounds of the nineteenth century. Between them, Poulenc was happy to remain as he was, essentially a free spirit, content to commentate rather than innovate.

Myaskovsky's Sonata was written only two years before his death and was dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave its first performance. It was the second of two cello sonatas (for which cellists should be thankful - he also wrote a concerto - and yet all three works remain largely unknown). The first, in D minor, was composed in 1911, but if anyone had quietly swapped the opus numbers around no-one would have noticed. The first sonata is adventurous harmonically and is structured in a more rhapsodic and exploratory way than the traditional formality of the second, which realises Myaskovsky's aim in later works for greater simplicity and diatonicism. The result is a melodic, singing sonata, a 'cantata' of a sonata!

The role of innovator is reserved for the American composer Elliott Carter. His music is concise, complex, difficult and yet clear. For me, this is music of its time, music that is breaking new ground. He found his early expression in neo-classicism, but his later music revealed a desire for more expressive quality. Traditional harmonic and melodic elements were no longer essential. Instead he explored the use of instrumental techniques as a framework upon which to build his form, and the Cello Sonata (dedicated to Bernard Greenhouse) exploits the technical differences between cello and piano. 

Carter devised a new dynamism in the Cello Sonata, a means of shifting tempo through precise notation. He called this 'metrical modulation'. The sonata also shows Carter's break with harmonic tradition. The second movement is his last music to have a key signature. It is a toe-tapping rhythmic whirl which is followed by a powerful and elegiac slow movement. The two outer movements are connected at the start and finish by the two independent conversationalists - a dry, percussive pulse for the piano co-exists with a constantly evolving melodic cello line. The cellist emerges cautiously but gathers momentum, colliding with the pianist in the central section of the first movement, then taking up the percussive pulse as though experimenting with the sensation. Carter still maintains the players' independence though, as their note values are deliberately different lengths. The finale is a flurry of syncopation drawing on earlier material. The metrical modulation drives the pulse forward with terrific urgency until an enormous avalanche of notes sweeps down from the climax and the music dramatically subsides to the opening theme of the sonata - but now at last the cellist accepts the piano's percussive role and the pianist too finds resolution in the cellist's original line.

Poulenc was a teenager when Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire caused such a stir in Paris. He grew up steeped in music of his time. And yet he was not concerned with new techniques. He was a wonderful observer and was himself a great performer. I can just imagine Poulenc as one of the two conversationalists in this sonata. His partnership as pianist with the singer Pierre Bernac was legendary, and he composed a wealth of fine songs, inspired by Bernac. He was entirely at home writing chamber music for wind instruments. But his string quartet is remembered only for being thrown into the Paris sewers, and whilst he did produce two astonishing string sonatas (for violin for Ginette Neveu and cello for Pierre Fournier), he found writing for the medium awkward. Yet the musical language itself is never inaccessible, as the energetic opening March of the Cello Sonata immediately shows. In the sublime Cavatine Poulenc paints a scene of enchantment in exquisite colours and detail. The spell is only broken in the playful, dancing Ballabile. The opening of the Finale displays music of much larger proportions, with strikingly dramatic chords. The players relish their dissonances before releasing their energy once more in a dazzle of virtuosity.