Book excerpt: "Brahms's Violin Sonatas: Style, Structure, and Performance is a companion volume to Joel Lester's award-winning 1999 study Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, and Performance. Using a minimum of technical language and with annotated musical examples illustrating almost every point, Brahms's Violin Sonatas explores three masterpieces of the concert repertoire in a book designed for performers and music scholars alike. A major focus is how much can be learned by carefully reading Brahms's artistically nuanced musical notation, and by understanding Brahms's style-especially his music's deep connections to Classical-Era harmony, phrasing, and form while at the same time using late-19th-century harmonies, dissonances, and thematic evolutions, along with the contrapuntal textures that imbues all his works with a uniquely "Brahmsian" sound. Lester also explores how these works relate to important events in Brahms's life. Practical and concrete suggestions on performance arise from many of these discussions, calling performers' and analysts' attention to both technical and interpretive matters. Lester's aim is to inspire readers to explore their own individual approaches to Brahms's music, balancing what they find in the music to how they balance today's performance and interpretive styles with the ways that Brahms himself and his contemporaries might have played and experienced his creations"--