What makes a sonata great? This most intimate form of chamber music, an equal give-and-take between two artists, has inspired composers from classical to modern times to write some of their most exciting, personal and delightfully intriguing music. From Brahms’s masterful, profound late-period clarinet sonata we move to Shostakovich’s last work, finished only weeks before his death. The mournful voice of the viola expresses Shostakovich’s farewell to the world. And no one in history elevated the sonata genre as dramatically as Beethoven, as we will hear in his early, nerve-rattling violin sonata in the composer’s signature stormy key of C minor.