LDV111-2

30 BEETHOVEN ∙ COMPLETE SONATAS AND VARIATIONS FOR CELLO AND PIANO It’s interesting that you mention the value of silence, an essential element of music that was to become increasingly important in the nineteenth century. Gary Hoffman: I notice that musicians are often so uncomfortable with silence that they get it over with as if it were an embarrassment. Yet silence is perhaps what I love most about music! In Beethoven, rhythm and pulse are so important that silence becomes essential. Eight years separate the Second Cello Sonata from the Third. The latter has no slow movement, as if the Adagio cantabile had become, in just a few bars, a prelude to the finale. How do you envisage the architecture of a score like that? Gary Hoffman: I’d prefer to say that the slow movement is represented here by the whole of the opening movement! That Allegro ma non tanto is so cantabile, so lyrical. . . Is it the note on the manuscript ‘Inter lacrimas et luctum’ (Amid tears and affliction) that explains its expressiveness, so filled with longing?