Notes from the Pianist, Peter Arnstein We premiered the Grasshopper Suite at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1995, in concert, on Scottish Public Radio, and on Scottish BBC’s live variety show, The Usual Suspects. The Suite was inspired by a concert in which I accompanied the British flautist, Trevor Wye, and which featured his arrangements of South American nightclub flute music. I composed the third movement first then the first movement, which was turned upside-down to form the second movement. While searching for a title to link all three, I noticed that the music was quite jumpy, like grasshoppers. Going back through the suite, every time I found a repeated note, I changed it to an octave jump, and thus did the Grasshopper Suite grow. Brahms Sonata in G Major Though this is Brahm’s first violin and piano sonata, it is always associated in my mind with the end of his life. It has preponderantly sad, ethereal quality, not present in the later two sonatas, that matches the excessive romanticism of the late nineteenth century, or impressionism of the early twentieth century, rather than the classic, balanced proportions of Brahms’ later chamber music. The overwhelming sadness reminds me of Brahms’ great difficulty in getting to Clara Shumann’s funeral. Clara Schumann was herself a great pianist, wife of composer Robert Schumann, and the unrequited love of Brahm’s life. She had, many years earlier, requested that the last movement be played at her funeral. On hearing of her death in 1896 he rushed to fulfill her wish but was so upset that he took wrong trains and spent forty hours in nonstop travel to arrive only as she was being buried. In fact, the last movement could describe a man blindly rushing for trains, so upset and depressed as to be no longer quite of this world. But that is not what Brahms was thinking, of course, when he finished it in 1879, as it is based on his song, Regenlied, in which the piano part represents the patter of raindrops. In the week following Clara’s death, Brahms sent his extraordinarily solemn Four Serious Songs to Clara Schumann’s daughter, Marie, with a letter explaining that he had sent all his other compositions to this particular house for criticism, approval, and opinion, and that it just seemed the right thing to do. Other than a few very sad organ chorales, they were the last music he was able to write before dying eleven months later.