Brahms composed a whole series of chamber music works, including his Second Violin Sonata in A major, during a summer visit to Thun in Switzerland in 1886. This wonderfully lyrical work is one of his most cheerful creations; his biographer Max Kalbeck once cryptically called it a “sonata of love and song”. The second subject of the first movement quotes the principal motif of Brahms’s own song “Wie Melodien zieht es mir”, and the other movements are similarly characterised by a melodious intimac...