Together again! Ahead of Inon Barnatan’s solo recital on July 11 and Alisa Weilerstein’s performance with the Aspen Festival Orchestra on July 12, the long-time collaborators team up for transcriptions of works by Shostakovich and Brahms.      

The pair begin with excerpts from the 24 Preludes by Shostakovich, modeled after Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

The cello is the only instrument that covers the full range of the human voice, making it the perfect medium for a selection of Brahms song transcriptions. Brahms’s rapturously lyrical First Violin Sonata gets its nickname “Rain Song” from his piece of the same name whose melody appears prominently in the last movement.

Shostakovich’s only Viola Sonata was his final work, completed in 1975, a day before he entered the hospital where he would die just over a month later. He appears to have meant it as a final farewell; indeed, three of the movements end with the description “dying away.” The work contains musical self-quotations from various periods in Shostakovich’s life, including his teen years, as well as a dream-like evocation of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.