Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Semyon Bychkov

In 1877, when Dvořák’s application for financial support and the score of his Moravian Duets were received by the committee in Vienna in charge of granting stipends, the jury member Johannes Brahms arrived at the opinion that Dvořák deserved more support. “He is definitely a very talented artist. And poor, incidentally. Please consider that!” Brahms wrote in a letter to his publisher Simrock. That was the beginning of Dvořák’s international success, and also of a 20-year friendship between the two composers.

It was also thanks to Brahms that Dvořák met the violinist and teacher Joseph Joachim. The first violinist of the Joachim Quartet, he premiered some of Dvořák’s chamber works, helping to spread awareness of his music. When Simrock commissioned a violin concerto from Dvořák in 1879, the composer reached an agreement with the famous virtuoso in Berlin that he would give the premiere.

Work on the composition proceeded slowly because Joachim returned the concerto to the composer several times with comments encouraging Dvořák to revise the work repeatedly. In the end, at the premiere in October 1883, instead of Joachim, the soloist was František Ondříček, to whom Brahms later also entrusted his Violin Concerto.

Joachim already had a major impact on the life of Johannes Brahms in his youth. He introduced the 20-year-old composer to Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, who later became one of the first interpreters of Brahm’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor.

The American pianist Emanuel Ax was already developing an intense relationship with Brahms at the conservatoire Brahms: “I already fell in love with his music as a teenager. From my parents, I had a recording of Rubinstein’s interpretation, and I wore out the grooves of two copies by playing them over and over.”

Besides having recorded both Brahms concertos, Ax has recordings of many of his chamber works to his credit. For recording the Brahms sonatas for cello and piano with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, he received three of his seven Grammy Awards.