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1 Andante – Allegro vivace
2 Adagio – Tempo d’Andante – Allegro vivace

Beethoven wrote two cello sonatas in 1815, both with the opus number 102. They could hardly be more different. Op. 102 No. 2 is a classic Beethoven journey from light, down into inkiest darkness, returning tentatively, then resolutely to light at the end. Op. 102 No. 1, however, is much more playful, quirky, teasing, like the Beethoven we sometimes meet in letters to his closest friends – Beethoven the verbal prankster, the lover of excruciating puns. And, while Op. 102 No. 2 is clearly divided into three weighty movements, No. 1 is much more fluid, at times seeming to delight in defying our expectations.

The opening Andante is a close, affectionate conversation between the cello and the piano. After a climactic flourish for the piano it comes to a pause – but we’ve hardly time to get used to this before the second section, marked Allegro vivace, springs off like a greyhound released from the trap. This sounds a lot more like the passionate, stormy Beethoven of legend, but it’s striking how carefully Beethoven balances the two instruments so that the much more powerful piano never overwhelms the cello.

At first the Adagio that follows seems to promise a profound slow meditation, but it isn’t long before the theme of the first movement drifts back in on the piano as though nothing had happened since we last heard it. This also comes to a pause, then piano and cello play with a tiny four-note rising figure, as though they were trying it out. Another Allegro vivace, the finale, grows from this, but this one is wonderfully upbeat and full of subversive fun – at a couple of points the cello softly imitates bagpipe drones while the piano snaps at it impatiently. But at the very end the two instruments are splendidly, joyously united.

1 Allegro ma non troppo
2 Adagio
3 Allegro appassionato

The American composer Samuel Barber was just 22 when he wrote his Cello Sonata, at which time he was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Barber himself gave the premiere in 1933 (he was a fine pianist) with his friend Orlando Cole playing the cello. It was a huge success, winning Barber both a Pulitzer Travel Stipend and a Prize from the American Academy in Rome, which enabled him to study for a year at the Academy. It was during that important formative year that he composed what was to become his famous Adagio for Strings.

Something of that Adagio’s deep melancholy can be heard in the Cello Sonata too, but here there are much wider contrasts, stylistically and emotionally. Barber studied Brahms’s two classic cello sonatas thoroughly before writing his own, and there are echoes of these in Barber’s sonata. He also worked closely with Orlando Cole to make sure his ideas were really suited to the cello. But, for all Brahms’s and Cole’s input, the result is pure Barber, in its sustained, warmly expressive melodic writing, and in the way the sonata balances ripe, impassioned late-Romanticism with an utterly 20th-century attitude to rhythm – especially in the last of the three movements, where rapid switches in metre (the number of beats to a bar) constantly throw the listener off balance. (Try counting along and you’ll soon get lost.)

The central movement also springs a surprise in the way it morphs from slow lyricism to a quick-fire Presto and then back again. At every stage, though, Barber remembers that this is a sonata for cello and piano: lively or passionate dialogue between the instruments is as important here as in the duo sonatas of Beethoven’s time.