Let's take a moment to meet and greet Brahms the musical poet

"When I listen, in my home, to this music played on a fine gramophone, I feel I receive the full impact the original listeners might have felt. In that atmosphere -- quietly listening alone, or with a person close to you -- they take your heart."

-- a special guest commentator who'll be sharing "his" Brahms with us

BRAHMS (AS WE MIGHT SAY) "DOES SCHERZO"

Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

by Ken

The above, in case you haven't guessed, is our mystery piece and pianist from last Sunday's "sneak preview of what I'm working on": the work that was identified as "Solo-piano work that comes before Op. 5," which is to say the 21-year-old Brahms's breakthrough work, the mighty and exalted Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, as performed by "Some kind of keyboard magician (don't you think?)" -- and on second hearing don't you still think? There's a tendency to think of Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991), even while ostensibly appreciating him, as a stalwart upholder of the grand Austro-Germanic Classical and Romantic tradition, which he assuredly was. Yet I often feel that this was just the most visible surface of his playing, that there was almost always something else going on, a free -- disciplined, yes, but still free -- range of imagination that he didn't adverise or flaunt but that could create not just musical intimacy but musical magic, often in standard repertory -- like many of the Beethoven piano sonatas -- where most pianists don't even know it's hiding.

I think we should really try to take in the whole of the F minor Sonata ("the whole" encompassing in this case not three or even four but five movements), but I'm not ready for that. Instead, for now we're going to jump over Op. 5 all the way to Op. 10, the set of Four Ballades that Brahms composed in 1854 -- in other words, early on in the period we're interested: 1854-58, the years when he got his new idea for the growing mass of musical material he had been developing, after transforming it from an incipient sonata for two pianos into something he thought could instead be developed into the symphony he so dearly wanted to write, and now instead was imagining as a big and bold piano concerto, which would occupy him until 1858 and not achieve performance in even preliminary form until 1859.

If these two forms, "scherzo" and "ballade," call to mind another great composer for the piano, one who may have brought to composition for the piano a higher-soaring poetic imagination than any other composer of the 19th -- or any other -- century, who happened to have wound up creating four each of these forms, scherzos and ballades, that's fine by me. It could be that this composer by sheerest chance happened also to have been in large measure a "discovery" of Robert Schumann, who was already providing Brahms with the inspiration of a composer centrally concerned with combining fluency in the Classical forms, with at the same time a grounding in the free flight of poetic imagination. Brahms would certainly have been keenly aware of this great predecessor, and all the music of his he laid hands on while the predecessor was still alive and composing up a storm until his always-fragile health gave way in 1849, when he was 39 and Brahms 16, achieving growing mastery of the piano and imagining himself as a composer.

It's not that Brahms's idea of a piano scherzo (and here we're thinking of "scherzo" not as a movement of a symphony or string quartet or other work in what we think of as "sonata form," even a piano sonata as a free-standing piano form rather than the scherzo movement of a symphony or string quartet or even piano sonata) or ballade is much like that predecessor's. Still, the fact that he gravitated to these forms, and in them let his imagination run free through subjects of human time and place and situation and mood, I don't see how any of this could have been an accident.

I don't think we often think of Brahms as, particularly, a font of supreme poetic imagination in music, but in the course of some random listening I was doing while pondering Brahms for our current project, I happened to hear the very recording we're going to be listening to in just a moment, and I was bowled over even more than I was by the Wilhelm Kempff recording of the Scherzo in E minor, with its magical range of touches and variously-breathed musical traceries. We're going to talk and learn a bit more about the construction of the Ballades, but first I'm proposing that we just listen to Kempff ensorcel his way through the Brahms Ballades. And once he's through them, I think we'll be primed for the appearance of a special guest commentator who's going to share some of the secrets of his lifelong love affair with Brahms's piano music, whom we're first going to hear play the Ballades.

BRAHMS: Ballades (4), Op. 10:
i. After the Scottish ballad: "Edward" in Herder's "Voices of the People" (Andante)
ii. Andante
iii. Intermezzo: Allegro
iv. Andante con moto

[ii. at 3:44; iii. at 10:06; iv. at 14:18] Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), February 1972

[ii. at 4:01; iii. at 9:52; iv. at 13:53] Our special guest commentator, piano. (Recording details to come later)


NOW LET'S MEET OUR SPECIAL GUEST BRAHMS-LOVER

Reminder: Leon Fleisher tonight at 7:30!* (Oops -- the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Musical Heritage tribute, that is)

*"Tonight" meaning Monday, the 24th of May (though if you've missed it, you haven't necessarily missed it -- see below)

[HINT: Eventually, if you stick it out, we've even got a spot o' music!]

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The Brahms waltzes in their full four-handed glory (near the end of the post)

TUESDAY UPDATE: The CMS Fleisher tribute was absolutely swell in all sorts of ways, most hilariously for pianist Jonathan Biss's story of earning -- though through no fault of his own, really -- his old teacher's withering scorn at LF's 2007 Kennedy Center Honors event. When the recording is posted, it should turn up in the link for all the Chamber Music Society Heritage programs. LATEST WORD is that as of Friday, May 28, the Fleisher Heritage program can be accessed at this link.

Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)

We hear LF, age 28, play No. 1 in B and (at 0:47) No. 2 in E from Brahms's solo version of his delectable Op. 39 set of 16 four-hand-piano mini-waltzes, recorded in Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City, in August 1956.

by Ken

Big-time apologies. The last four or five days have been a strange time for me, with closer to three days than two without Internet, phone, or e-mail access. Still, by later yesterday it should have been possible for me to get up, in more timely fashion, the intended reminder about the latest installment in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Musical Heritage series, devoted to Leon Fleisher -- again, tonight (Monday) at 7:30. If the timing is just right, you might still be able to register. Happily, even if you can't, we know now that all of CMS's Heritage programs can be accessed online.

Even I was surprised, when I went looking for the post that contained the CMS Musical Heritage link (which turned out to be from April 4, the day before the Pablo Casals tribute) and tried searching by "Leon Fleisher," to see how many SC posts that turned up. Mostly, of course, they pertain to the initial, physically unencumbered part of LF's career, when with his remarkable pianistic capabilities and his preternaturally early full-blown musical maturity, it seemed like he could do anything that can be done at a keyboard.

Pardon me for saying it again, but it still hits home for me that the recordings LF made with George Szell of the combined seven piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms (with a fine assortment of others, like Schumann and Grieg, thrown in as a bonus) have for some six decades remained pretty much continuously available in the recorded-music medium-of-the-day, and through all those decades have remained part of the elite circle of best-ever recordings of some of the most-recorded works in the repertory.


WHO COULD HAVE IMAGINED THAT LF'S CAREER WAS
GOING TO TAKE A MARKEDLY DIFFERENT DIRECTION?

Arthur Rubinstein leads us on the next leg of our expedition through Brahms's First Piano Concerto

Being post no. 8 in our curious Brahms blog odyssey
(See the box "THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far" at the end of the post)

Final encore: Within two weeks of his 88th birthday, the legendary Arthur Rubinstein (Jan. 28, 1887 - Dec. 20, 1982) concluded his last recital -- a "Benefit Concert for Israel" at Ambassador College in Pasadena on Jan. 15, 1975 -- in affectionate mode, with Mendelssohn's "Spinning Song" (from Book VI of the Songs Without Words, Op. 67, No. 4). The Pasadena recital turned out to be by no means his final public performance, however -- see below.

by Ken

After our May 10 "after-post" detour, "A proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets," it was time to get back to business, or at least to the immediately preceding digression, which is to say the diversion by which Brahms's first clear shot at a symphony turned -- over a five-year period -- into the D minor Piano Concerto, which we began investigating in the May 9 post "Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it," in which we managed to get through the mammoth first movement. Although the technology-induced panic chronicled in today's "emergency post tease" ("With a bunch of audio clips still to be made, we glimpse where we're headed in our quick look at the Brahms concertos") has messed up my plan for moving on through the other three Brahms concertos, which we were at least able to sample therein, it hasn't changed the rest of the plan for this main post: to get us to the finish line of the D minor Concerto.


THROUGH ALL OF TODAY'S HUBBUB, THE SPIRIT OF ARTHUR
RUBINSTEIN HAS BEEN WAITING FOR US TO CATCH UP

Emergency post tease: With a bunch of audio clips still to be made, we glimpse where we're headed in our quick look at the Brahms concertos

SORT-OF-EXPLANATORY NOTE: It serves me right for not having premade all the audio clips I thought I'd be using today. Well, wouldn't you know that by the time I had this "emergency" tease nearing readiness, the crisis seems to have passed. Of course there'll be such a backload of derailed uploading to be done that I'm going to go ahead with this, um, whatever-it-is, more or less as is, or as was.


If the YouTube clip -- of Sir András Schiff playing the concluding Rondo (Allegro non troppo) of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, with Sir Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, doesn't load (and, with no way of checking before posting, I'm trying to prepare from this far-from-unlikely eventuality), you can watch it on YouTube.
POST-POSTING UPDATE: The clip appears to be functional. Happy day!

by Ken

Much of what follows was written: (1) after discovering, as per the hysterical note atop this post, that I was screwed clip-making-wise by a breakdown at Internet Archive, but (2) before finally discovering that I was at least somewhat unscrewed by a resumption of data-uploading capability at IA. What follows is a mishmosh of stuff written at various stages of the crisis.

BEFORE THE CRISIS: It looked to be an easy morning. With much of today's main post written and many (if far from all) of the planned audio clips made, I took comfort last night before going to bed (yes, for once on a Saturday I threw caution to the winds and went to bed) in having finally settled, more or less, on the "master clip list." (I count it as a list even if it's not written down but just in my head.) The hard work, I thought, of zeroing in on those final half-dozen or so clips was done, leaving the actual business of final clip-making for the morning. Oh, that can be pretty time-consuming. Still, it's labor that's minimally encumbered by the thought proces.

One possible un red flag Sunday clip-making chez Internet Archive is always risky, as there tends to be such a heavy volume of activity. Even so, I got off to a good start this morning, hitting several of the "still-to-be-made" items on the master clip list. And then Internet Archive went nuts, cycling endlessly in a clearly futile attempt to receive my data uploads, and not even allowing me to cancel the effort. And here I was with all three of the at-long-last-chosen clips representing the concluding Rondo of the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto still on the to-be-made list.

Nor would my sketchy backup plans work. They would have consisted either of "teasing" the soon-to-come quick survey of the four Brahms concertos, or outright switching a portion of that undertaking to a preview. Even when I scavenged the DWT Archive for usable clips, of which there were plenty. With one kind of critical exception: not a single ready-made clip of the concluding Rondo of the D minor Piano Concerto, the work that is our principal order of business for the day. Uh-oh!


I GOT THE POSSIBLY WORKABLE IDEA, AS A STOPGAP,
OF PLUGGING IN A YOUTUBE CLIP OF THAT MOVEMENT

After-post: As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

TUESDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Now that I can hear the audio clips in place, I've added some notes on the First Quartet performances

One-stop shopping: I love the Borodin Trio, and I really love this set, so much so that we're going to dip into it twice. For openers, here's the Borodin playing the dramatic first-movement Allegro of the Brahms First Piano Quartet (in G minor, Op. 25):


Borodin Trio (Luba Edlina, piano; Rostislav Dubinsky, violin; Yuli Turovsky, cello); with Rivka Golani, viola. Chandos, recorded in Layer Marney Church, Colchester (England), July 14-16, 1988

by Ken

In Sunday's post, "Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it," you may recall that I flirted with the idea of expanding my tiny-clip offering of the opening of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, Op. 26, to include a corresponding sliver of the opening of its vastly different fraternal twin, the G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25. For once, though, I exercised restraint, and remained steadfast even when I was tempted to shoehorn in additional mini-clips as an update.

The idea wouldn't quit me, however. And since the subject we're exploring is the way Brahms, despite his habitual use of existing musical forms, tended to reinvent them pretty much every time he worked in them, it quickly occurred to me that it would actually be easier -- far less labor-intensive -- to plunk in whole movements rather than do the grindingly picky work of making mini-clips, and to do so for all three of the piano quartets.


HERE AT SUNDAY CLASSICS WE'VE PONDERED THE
BRAHMS PIANO QUARTETS ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS

Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it

aka Part 2 of "More 'pre-post' than 'tease': If our sights are set on Brahms's First Symphony, why are we listening to his First Piano Concerto? (Part 1)" -- also now variously updated

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The promised after-post, "As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets," is up now

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

Hungarian-born George Szell (1897-1970) was past 40 when he first recorded the Brahms D minor Concerto -- in 1938, with no less than the great Artur Schnabel! We see him here c1965, after his recordings of the concerto with Leon Fleisher and Clifford Curzon but before his second recording of it (the one we've been hearing) with Rudolf Serkin.

by Ken

I've left you hanging (from Thursday's "pre-post") with those unidentified Performances A, B, anc C -- plus two "bonus" performances -- of the enormous and enormously complex first movement of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, into which we crashed at the start of our look at the composer's enormously difficult path to the creation of his First Symphony. The young Brahms, you'll recall, flush with the excitement of his "discovery," notably via the gushing seal of approval delivered by Robert Schumann (and now enjoying the warm support of both Robert and Clara Schumann), thought he was on the way to nailing the symphony that would be expected of any touted successor to the line of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and of course Schumann himself.

Somewhere along the line, alas, during the hopeful repurposing-into-a-symphony of a sonata for two pianos of which he'd composed three movements, he found himself faced with an impasse: a first movement growing to supersize which his inner voices told him he couldn't make a symphony of. It doesn't seem to have taken him long, though, to conjure up a Plan C: not a sonata for two pianos, not a symphony, but . . . .

MAYBE, JUST PERHAPS, A PIANO CONCERTO?

Say, can you do this in a symphony?


Emil Gilels, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, June 1972

More 'pre-post' than 'tease': If our sights are set on Brahms's First Symphony, why are we listening to his First Piano Concerto? (Part 1)

MAY 11 UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

"I will never compose a symphony. You have no conception of how it feels for the likes of one of us when he's always hearing such a giant marching behind him."

-- Brahms, to his friend the conductor Hermann Levi, in early 1870

Note the opus number (15). Brahms won't notch a symphony till Op. 68.

WHAT DO THESE THREE PERFORMANCES HAVE IN COMMON?
WHAT ELSE DO TWO OF THE THREE HAVE IN COMMON?
[NOTE: Not trick questions . . . no, really . . . I don't think]

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15:
i. Allegro
With some early-in-the-movement cue points:
[1] The orchestra sounds the 2nd theme
[2] The piano enters
[3] The piano sounds the 2nd theme . . .
[4] . . . and finally takes it into new territory

Performance A

[1] at 0:55, [2] at 3:19, [3] at 4:31, [4] at 5:53
Performance B

[1] at 1:00, [2] at 3:39, [3] at 4:56, [4] at 6:24
Performance C

[1] at 0:58, [2] at 3:27, [3] at 4:41, [4] at 6:03

Note: I've thrown in those early-movement cue points because, along with the very start of the movement, they can be helpful places to register the conductor's and soloist's abilities, perspectives, and present musical intentions. The very opening orchestral outburst can claim our attention by holding out promise of something important to come, or it can devolve, as it so often does, into slithery, even repulsive orchestral muck. (I always think all those damn trills have something to do with this, if they're grossly or even slovenly executed. This plus maybe the thwacking-away timpani.)

How quickly, though, this hubbub resolves into the orchestra's first statement of the literally up-rising and potentially so uplifting 2nd theme, whose latent expressive force seems to me the often-underappreciated generative force of the working-out of this enormous movement. The surprising entry of the piano, so effortlessly taking complete control of the show, at first in such a calm way, but rapidly building into such a confident display of energy. Then, when the pianist takes over that 2nd theme, at first it seems unclear where he means to go with it, until he reaches that potentially lift-us-out-of-our-seats restatement that's my last cue.

By the way, in that Brahms quote atop the post, we all know who that "giant" was whom our Johannes was always hearing stomping up on him from behind? Usually when this line is quoted his name is usually added here in brackets, but I don't think we have to do that, do we? -- Ed.

by Ken

Yes, I know we were supposed to be moving on to the post proper after our two post "teases" in: Sunday's "How do we -- or maybe I mean how did Brahms -- get to this from this?" and predawn Tuesday's "Just a bit more teasing before we get to the main post . . ."). And I had it worked out where we could accomplish what we need to accomplish in something like a single post, or more likely a two-part single post.

Or so I thought.

Then things got complicated. There's still a draft post on e-ice with the working title: " 'Post tease 3'? More than a 'tease,' let's call this Part 1 of our proper Brahms First Symphony post"


AS EARLY AS 1854 BRAHMS THOUGHT HE WAS
HOT ON THE TRAIL OF THAT FIRST SYMPHONY

Just a bit more teasing before we get to the main post . . .

MAY 11 UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"


NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA, recorded live in Carnegie Hall, Nov. 9, 1951

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, January 1997

Gerhart Hetzel, violin; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Musikvereinssaal, Oct. 3, 1981

by Ken

It's not that complicated a story, and by no means an especially profound one, I'm trying to tell here, about this searingly beautiful movement we heard in Sunday's preliminary "post tease" ("How do we -- or maybe I mean how did Brahms -- get to this from this?"). I thought, though, that we could use an additional round of teasing before we get to it, and so we've started by rehearing our not-exactly-mysterious "mystery" Adagio sostenuto, in three performances that are about as different -- not just in pacing but in outlook and texture and tone -- as I could throw together on short notice.


FOR THE RECORD, I'M KEEPING ONE "TEASE" PROMISE

Post tease: How do we -- or maybe I mean how did Brahms -- get to this from this?

MAY 11 UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

HOW DO WE GET TO HERE --

The ending of the movement:


Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Los Angeles, 1959

Gerhart Hetzel, violin; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Musikvereinssaal, Oct. 3, 1981

FROM HERE?

The start of the movement:


Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Los Angeles, 1959

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Musikvereinssaal, Oct. 3, 1981

by Ken

I'll explain in the post proper how I came to be listening to this movement, which we're going to poke around a little -- and then hear the complete work it comes from. But one thing I found myself wondering on my happy return to this much-loved piece is what Brahms knew when in this particular movement's construction. I mean, did he know when he imagined the thing where and how it was going to wind up? Or did he maybe know that from the start but not quite know where that luminous end was going to wind up coming from?


IF YOU KNOW THE ANSWER (SO MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT THIS PIECE), I DON'T REALLY WANT TO KNOW