After completing the Fourth Symphony in 1885, Brahms devoted his attention to chamber music and to the cultivation of a more concise style. The Cello Sonata, op. 99, the Violin Sonata, op. 100, and the Piano Trio, op. 101 - all composed in the summer of 1886 - show a remarkable distillation of his characteristic motivic density, harmonic richness and rhythmic elasticity. His friend Heinrich von Herzogenberg was quick to spot this "new drift", as he called it, noting that the music was "constructed in the plainest possible way from ideas at once striking and simple, fresh and youthful in their emotional qualities, ripe and wise in their incredible compactness." During the following summer Brahms was inspired to use both solo string instruments of op. 99, 100 and 101 in a symphonic context. The Concerto for Violin and Cello, op. 102 - his last work for orchestra - manifests on a larger scale the same sense of economy applied to the recent chamber works.

Brahm's reasons for composing the concerto may have been as much personal as muscical. In 1880 he had alienated his lifelong friend Joseph Joachim by taking sides with his wife Amalie in a marital dispute. The Double Concerto, dedicated to the great violinist, was in part a gesture of affection and reconciliation. The two artists collaborated in the composition of the work (Brahms sought Joachim's advice in writing for the violin) as well as its premiere, which took place on 18 October 1887 at Cologne, with Joachim, the cellist Robert Hausmann and Brahms conducting. ...

Brahms wrote the Academic Festival Overture in 1880 as a gesture of gratitude to the University of Breslau, which had awarded him an honorary doctorate. He himself aptly described the work as a "rollicking potpourri of student songs à la Suppé"; quoted in it are Wir hatten gebauet, Der Landesvater, Was kommt dort von der Höh? and Gaudeamus igitur. The jovial spirit of the music allows little room for serious thematic development, but even here Brahms remains characteristically faithful to the sonata principle: in the final part of the overture all the themes are recapitulated in the tonic key.

Walter Frisch