Sunday Classics with Ken (from DownWithTyranny): 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

And I was pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of possibilities, including a number of recordings I've never heard. From which I chose the one that you may or may not have seen atop this "tease" post, which I figured would at least give me an idea whether the gods of embedding would allow this one.
Sure, I'm bluffing, but what say we go on as if nothing happened? And therefore nothing unhappened, or sort-of-unhappened, or whatever. The idea here was --

Since we'll be finishing up with the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto in today's main post, and I had it in mind to do a quick survey of the four Brahms concertos (two for piano, one for violin, and one for violin and cello), maybe hearing just the first movement of each, and maybe hearing them all conducted by the same conductor. This kept growing and convoluting, but that was the basic idea, and it was so settled in my head that I didn't even bother to actually make all those clips, figuring I could knock 'em off en masse once I had my finalized list in hand.

Ha!

However, the Maestoso of the Serkin-Ormandy Brahms First Concerto was already made because it was one of the "bonus" clips from the three "mystery performances" of the movement we heard 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."
which was thrown a loop when the clip-creation process ground to a halt today with so many clips unmade. What follows is a helter-skelter reconstruction, or rather patch-together.

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15:
i. Maestoso

My obvious candidate for the "Brahms all-concerto single-conductor" sweep was good old Eugene Ormandy, and it happens that at first this still looked promising, since the clip for the First Concerto first movement was sitting right there in the Archive. Then I realized it was there because we already heard it! It was one of the "bonus clips" along with our three "mystery peformances" 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." We were almost off to a good start here. One basic plan for a quick survey of the four Brahms concertos via their first movements was to have Ormandy-conducted clips for all four. This
The Brendel-Abbado clip was also intended for the sweep-the-concertos-by-conductor thing, which will now be messed up by my inclusion of the clips that were already made. Oh well.

Rudolf Serkin, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Town Hall, Dec. 10, 1961

Alfred Brendel, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, Sept. 6-9, 1986

BRAHMS: Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77:
i. Allegro non troppo

The Shaham-Abbado clip is another actually-made clip for the "Brahms concerto first-movement survey" I had in mind, and again, using it here kind of blows the disconcertingly complex plan I'd devised -- and actually shelled out some hard coin to facilitate -- for a pan-Abbado sweep. Again, oh well.

I think the Szeryng-Haitink clip was made at an early stage of the pre-thinking for this post, on the theory that it's hard to imagine any group of recordings into which a Szeryng-Haitink performance would not slide effortlessly. Or wait, maybe I was thinking I might have Haitink-conducted recordings of all four Brahms concertos. Which I do, but not on CD, which is still my only clippable medium. Still, how nice it was to find this performance sitting patiently in the DWT Archive.

Gil Shaham, violin; Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, May 2000

Henryk Szeryng, violin; Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded April 1973

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 83:
i. Allegro non troppo

You'd think the Rubinstein-Coates and Rubinstein-Munch clips were made to be heard alongside Arthur Rubinstein's later recordings of the concerto (from 1958 with Josef Krips and 1971 with Eugene Ormandy), but I don't see any trace of any such clips, which leads me to wonder whether we ever actually heard the Coates and Munch versions. The Fleisher-Szell clip was made, er, maybe 'cause I thought we might want to hear it after hearing the Fleisher-Szell recording of the first movement of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, which was one of our "mystery" performances (and which we're scheduled to hear again in the working version of today's main post). Um, whatever.

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded in Symphony Hall, Aug. 11, 1952

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Albert Coates, cond. EMI, recorded in Kingsway Hall, Oct. 22-23, 1929

Leon Fleisher, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Oct. 19-20, 1962

BRAHMS: Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra
in A minor, Op. 102: i. Allegro

I would have guessed that the Szeryng-Starker-Haitink clip was part of the same planning-ahead impulse that I guessed above led to the Szeryng-Haitink clip of the first movement of the Violin Concerto -- except that this clip, I see, was made in 2010! My second guess is that this is one of the many clips in the DWT Archive created for a way-back-when post (2010, at a guess!) devoted to the Brahms Double Concerto. Either way, I'm right glad to have it.

Isaac Stern, violin; Leonard Rose, cello; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Apr. 4, 1964

Henryk Szeryng, violin; János Starker, cello; Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded in the Concertgebouw, September 1970

YOU MAY WONDER, "SO WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE
HEADED WITH ALL THIS?" AND WELL YOU MAY ASK

There are many ways to answer. By now you should know that ultimately we're headed right back to the Brahms First Symphony, which -- though I've yet to explain exactly how -- was set in motion by a chance hearing of this, which I've described more than once as one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know.

BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto

Dresden Staatskapelle, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Eurodisc, recorded 1971

Vienna Philharmonic, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded 1967

Philharmonia Orchestra, Arturo Toscanni, cond. Recorded live in the Royal Albert Hall, Sept. 29, 1952

Well, another of the absolutely most beautiful pieces of music I know is this, of which we happen to have such a superabundance in the DWT Archive that we can let this out and still have enough for future use. It's such a familiar piece that I know many of you will recognize it, but I hope there are folks who don't -- how swell is it to "discover" such an extraordinary piece?

Mystery Andante

Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Zdeněk Košler, cond. Praga, recorded live, 1976

David Oistrakh, violin; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded May 12-13, 1969

Jascha Heifetz, violin; Gregor Piatigorskky, cello; RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Alfred Wallenstein, cond. RCA, recorded in Hollywood, May 19-20, 1960

[SPOILER ALERT!] THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far

• "Arthur Rubinstein leads us on the next leg of our expedition through Brahms's First Piano Concerto" [5/16/2021 #2]

With many digressions we hear three Arthur Rubinstein perfs of the Adagio of Op. 15; then Ivan Moravec, Bruno Leonardo Gelber and Van Cliburn play the Rondo

• "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" [5/16/2021 #1]

In anticipation of "doing" the 2nd and 3rd mvmts of the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto, a quick survey of the 1st mvmts of all 4 Brahms concertos + "beautiful" Brahms (2 mvmts)

• "After-post: As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets" [5/10/2021]

By Borodin Trio et al.: 3 perfs each of 1st mvmt of all 3 Brahms piano quartets (+ Schoenberg orch. of No. 1)

• "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' ") [5/9/2021]

Brahms & Beethoven mini-clips. Perfs A-B-C of Brahms Piano Cto No. 1 = Fleisher-Szell-Cleveland, Curzon-Szell-LSO, Serkin-Szell-Cleveland; bonus perfs = Curzon-van Beinum, Serkin-Ormandy

• "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)" [5/6/2021]