Brahms - Cello Sonata No. 2, Op. 99 (Transcribed for String Quintet)

I first started this project back in 2010, when I was living in Cleveland and pursuing my doctorate. I honestly do not remember what prompted me to begin a string quintet version of Brahms’s F major Cello Sonata. At the time, I was still entering notes one by one in Finale, without a MIDI keyboard, and everything took an absurd amount of time. Unsurprisingly, the project stalled early in the final movement and sat untouched for years.

I have thought about coming back to it many times, especially as my working methods have changed so much. I moved to Sibelius professionally around 2016 and more recently to Dorico, which has made revisiting older projects far less daunting. A few years ago I released the slow movement on its own, but this past year I finally returned to finish the entire sonata.

What surprised me most was how much of my earlier work I wanted to keep. There were interpretive decisions I would probably not make today, but many of them still felt convincing. One example appears in the first movement, measures 56–58 and again in the recapitulation, where I introduced a triplet figure against the sixteenth-note motion, something not present in the original piano score. I had completely forgotten about it, but hearing it again, it captured exactly how I imagined the music at the time, so it stayed. With more years of arranging behind me, the refinement process felt clearer and more instinctive.

The goal of this arrangement was never to “improve” Brahms, but to translate the piano writing into a string language that feels natural and collaborative. The cello part remains exactly as Brahms wrote it, while the piano accompaniment is reimagined for string quartet, scored for a string quintet with two cellos, very much in the spirit of the Schubert Quintet. The aim is to preserve the density, rhythmic energy, and inner voicing of the original while allowing the music to breathe as chamber music for strings.

In the end, finishing this arrangement felt less like completing a task and more like reconnecting with an earlier version of myself. Some things have changed, some instincts have sharpened, but the musical impulse behind the project still felt familiar, and that was deeply satisfying.