Cello Sonata in D minor, H. 125

The sonata unfolds in two large movements rather than the usual four, so listen for shifts of mood within each rather than clean breaks between them.

The first movement opens warmly, with the cello singing a broad, flowing melody over rippling piano writing that still recalls Brahms and Fauré. As the movement continues, the harmony grows more restless and searching, a sign of the years (1913 to 1917) over which Bridge composed the piece, a span that crossed the outbreak of war.

The second movement begins in a darker, more unsettled key and covers more emotional ground: passages of tense recitative-like dialogue between cello and piano alternate with lyrical returns of earlier material. Listen for a sense of memory, ideas from the first movement resurface, transformed and more troubled, before the sonata works toward a hard-won, ambiguous close rather than a triumphant one.

Throughout, the piano is a full partner, not an accompanist, weaving in and out of the cello's line, and the two instruments frequently trade the melody back and forth.

Bridge began the sonata in 1913, when his musical language still leaned on the rich, late-Romantic idiom of his early chamber works. He set it aside and returned to finish it in 1917, in the middle of the first world war, a conflict that troubled him deeply and left an audible mark on the music's harmony and mood. The gap between the two halves of composition helps explain why the sonata seems to move from warmth toward something more searching and unresolved. It has since become one of the most performed British cello sonatas of its era, valued by cellists as a bridge, in every sense, between Edwardian lyricism and the more astringent, modern voice Bridge would develop in his later works.