Raphael Wallfisch (cello) and Simon Callaghan (piano)

Ethel Smyth first met Brahms in Leipzig in the late 1870s. She greatly admired his music and got to know him well, her cello sonata being published in 1887, the same year as Brahms’s F major cello sonata. This concert presents both works, opening with Beethoven’s late ‘free’ cello sonata from the 1820s, and ending with Cesar Franck’s famous violin sonata, arranged for cello by Jules Delsart with Franck’s permission in the late 1880s. Curiously, there is evidence the work started life as a cello sonata, before Franck reworked it into a violin sonata as a wedding gift for his friend Ysaÿe.