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?This choice of concerto over symphony for formal ground-breaking can seem strange to us. It sure did to me. From Beethoven on through to Bruckner and Mahler, hasn't the symphony the obvious form for breaking the bounds of old forms, for expanding imaginative horizons? Except maybe for three things:
Emil Gilels, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, June 1972
[You'll recognize this as the piano's solo entrance in the first movement of the Brahms D minor Concerto.]
(1) Unlike Brahms detractors who question his early-career orchestral prowess, I think he could handle an orchestra just fine when that's what he needed to do, his musical grounding was at the keyboard, and I don't think there's any question that he felt more sure of the musical ground he was treading when there was a piano on it.
(2) He must have sensed that the work that was taking shape would be highly dramatic, and if he didn't feel confident he knew how to channel and develop drama with purely orchestral resources, if he had a piano alongside the orchesstra, his brain started fizzing at the thought of what he could make them interact, working both against and with each other.
(3) And in the matter of historical precedent, it was already laid out for him. Maybe not Haydn or Schubert as examples, but Mozart and Beethoven for sure. For all the greatness of Mozart's symphonies, not to mention his string quartets and quintets, when he could sit at a keyboard and interact with an orchestra, he could create musical drama in a way that had no equal short of an opera house. And Beethoven? Sure, he'd shown how he could stretch him imagination in his symphonies. and broken the form wide open with his Ninth, but long before he got to the Ninth Symphony, he'd been breaking forms wide open with his Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos and his Violin Concerto, whose first movements had grown to mammoth size.
Beethoven had already shown that you didn't have to stick to the old concerto first-movement model of having the orchestra sound the traditional elements of a sonata-form expposition, then bringing in the soloist for a repeat (the equivalent of sonata form's traditional exposition repeat) in which even the things that are more or less the same aren't the same at all once you've got that soloist involved. As often as we may have heard it, it's hard to spoil the wonderfulness of the opening of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto:
Ah, there's nothing like it! Actually, though, I can think of one thing that is definitely sort-of-like it:
Emil Gilels, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Apr. 26-27 and May 1, 1957
Emil Gilels, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded in Severance Hall, Apr.-May 1968
This is the opening of the second of Brahms's three piano quartets, the A major, Op. 26. It's not a ripoff or imitation. It's not even like the Beethoven G major Concerto opening, which clearly is an introduction, whereas Brahms has actually launched his movement with the first theme of the exposition, so effortlessly shared between piano on the one hand and the three strings on the other, separate and yet together. Still, it seems clear to me that there's the most courteous of hat tips here. The A major Piano Quartet, is a rather Beethovenian instance of two works coming into the world as more or less fraternal twins (think, most vividly, of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies); the G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25, could hardly be more different, as we could hear easily by just comparing the opening of . . . no, we better not go there. The last thing we need right now is yet another diversion. Still, someday . . . .
Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Borodin Quartet members (Mikhail Kopelman, violin; Dmitri Shebalin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello). Philips, recorded in the Grange du Meslay, Tours (France), c1986
UPDATE: As per the UPDATE note at the end of the post, there's nowSo we're talking about piano concertos, and should remember that Beethoven still had another one in him before he moved on (more than anything, it appears, because the piano concertos -- such a bright part of his oeuvre for as long as he pursued them -- had always been written with his own soloistic use in mind, and by this point his degraded hearing was making it increasingly impractical to think of himself in that role). What he he came up with for the opening of the Emperor Concerto is a still-different and yet also pretty wonderful way to enlist the soloist for an all-in plunge:in the works"an 'after-post' bearing proper samplings of not just the first two but all three of Brahms's piano quartets."Stay tuned.MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: It's up now!
A NOTE ABOUT THE GILELS CLIPS
Emil Gilels, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Apr. 30-May 1, 1957
Emil Gilels, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded in Severance Hall, Apr.-May 1968
As Soviet authorities slowly opened a path to the West for its artists in the late 1950s, Emil Gilels (1916-1985) was quick to tell enthralled greeters that they hadn't heard anything till they heard his great compatriot Sviatoslav Richter. Well, it's no shame to be no. 2 to Richter, but Gilels was in his very different way(s) quite a stupendous artist in his own right.When I decided to include the four Brahms mini-clips we've just heard and started to think about performances, there was no question but that my first thought went to Emil Gilels, who not only could provide us with all three concerto clips but could be such different kinds of pianist, sometimes serially, sometimes simultaneously, seemingly at will. (And he almost could have furnished us with the piano-quartet clip as well. There is a recording of him playing Brahms's First Piano Quartet, the mighty G minor, with Amadeus Quartet members, but not, as far as I know, the Second -- well, I figured Sviatoslav Richter, in whose shadow Gilels so often stood, would make a satisfactory stand-in.) But for the two Beethoven concerto-openings, the Gilels recordings I had in mind would be from the Beethoven concerto cycle he recorded in Cleveland with none other than George Szell -- our Brahms Man of the Day! As a matter of fact, Gilels qualifies qualifies doubly for membership in the little "Brahms circle" we seem to be forming, in that he's the other pianist, apart from Leon Fleisher, with whom Maestro Szell and "his" Cleveland Orchestra recorded the five Beethoven piano concertos.
I duly plucked those CDs from the shelf and set them down, as I so often set things down, somewhere. As time ticked mercilessly on, and I continued filling the other gaps in this post, the Gilels-Szell CDs were still at large. In the meantime I'd already made the Gilels-Jochum Brahms clip, so I hated to give up the idea of using Gilels for the two Beethoven concerto clips. So I decided to go back to his recordings of these concertos with Leopold Ludwig, which -- as you can now hear -- are very different, soft-grained and almost laid-back alongside the vigor and decisiveness of the Gilels-Szell performances. It's obvious that Ludwig and Szell are very different conductors, but doesn't it sound like Gilels is two very different pianists? I decided I would add listings for the Gilels-Szell indicated as "to come." As you may have figured out, with post construction draggging on so interminably, the Gilels-Szell CDs turned up, and the clips were duly made and inserted. -- Ed.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK (FINALLY!)
TO OUR BRAHMS CONCERTO IN HAND
At this point I think we're ready to listen again to the opening Maestoso of the Brahms D minor Concerto, and really, we're just going to rehear the performances we already heard, except this time they're all identified. As you can see, the element in common element for Performances A, B, and C is -- rather an important one -- the conductor, George Szell, and the element in common beetween two of them, specifically A and C, is that they were recorded with Szell's own long-time orchestra, the Cleveland, in their normal workplace, Severance Hall, by (effectively) the same company. Szell had a cornerstone discographic relationship with Leon Fleisher; their recordings of all the Beethoven and Brahms concertos have remained catalog staples for more than 60 years now, always at the top of the heap. (They also recorded the Grieg-Schumann coupling and Mozart 25.) For that matter, Szell's relationships with Clifford Curzon and Rudolf Serkin went back a ways.
I'll say a little more after we've (re)heard the performances. In addition, to help focus our listening and hearing experiences, we're going to have an unvolunteered "guest commentator" -- you may want to take a look at the British critic Richard Osborne's thoughts about this movement before (or between) listening, or of course you can always come back afterward for some repeat listening. Note that, just for reference, I've carried over without change the Thursday post's quick characterizations of the then-unnamed Pianists A-B-C.
BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15:
i. Maestoso
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:
San Francisco-born pianist Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)
In 2003, L.F. resumed (limited) public two-handed playing, after his decades-long inability to use his right hand for performance.[1] at 0:55, [2] at 3:19, [3] at 4:31, [4] at 5:53
Leon Fleisher, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Feb. 21-22, 1958
Our 29-year-old soloist is heard here, at the considerable height of his pianistic powers in a piece that had played an important role in his meteoric rise to international fame. In this extraordinarily difficult piece, which requires strength, digital finesse, and tonal beauty, I think we hear a feeling of "I can do anything." He would go on to a career of notable length and artistic importance, but not quite the career that he (or we) imagined.Performance B:
British (London-born) pianist Clifford Curzon (1907-1982)
Collectors will instantly recognize the photo Decca famously used for the original LP jacket of the 1962 Curzon-Szell Brahms D minor Concerto.[1] at 1:00, [2] at 3:39, [3] at 4:56, [4] at 6:24
Clifford Curzon, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, May 1962
Pianist B, who also had a long and distinguished career, is heard here in his second recording of the Brahms D minor Concerto (see below), made in the month he turned 55. His public probably thought of him as, above all, a poet of the piano, but he liked to flash his virtuoso chops. I think both are in display here, in one of the most highly regarded recordings of this piece.. . . and nine years before Performance B
[1] at 1:01, [2] at 3:37, [3] at 4:54, [4] at 6:21
Clifford Curzon, piano; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Eduard van Beinum, cond. Decca, recorded in the Concertgebouw, May 1953
Performance C:
Bohemian-born German (German-American?) pianist Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991)
DG used this lovely Serkin portrait for the Mozart 8 & 27 the 80-ish pianist recorded in the 1981-88 series of 15 Mozart concertos with Claudio Abbado.[1] at 0:58, [2] at 3:27, [3] at 4:41, [4] at 6:03
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Apr. 19-20, 1968
It may seem redundant to note that Pianist C also enjoyed a remarkably long and distinguished career -- keyboard careers don't come a lot longer or more distinguished than his. He was also an avid chamber performer (come to think of it, Pianist B was also a valued chamber player), and like Pianist A he would have an outsize influence on future generations of performers. Through that long playing career he would be closely identified with the Brahms concertos; this recording, made when he was 65, is to the best of my knowledge his fifth as well as last of the Brahms D minor (see below for the fourth). His distinctively decisive keyboard touch enabled him to generate a fair amount of sound while maintaining digital accuracy and his own distinctive but pleasing enough sound, and he was a famously insightful interpreter.. . . and six years before Performance C
[1] at 0:57, [2] at 3:27, [3] at 4:40, [4] at 5:54
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Town Hall, Dec. 10, 1961
SZELL WAS A FAMOUSLY EYES-FRONT, NO-NONSENSE GUY
Yes, our George was that kind of musician, but he wasn't, at least not generally, a time-beating martinet. In fact, as you'll find out when we get back to the Brahms First Symphony, what got me off on this whole Brahms kick was cleaning up and listening to an Epic "gold label" LP of Szell's Cleveland Brahms First and hearing that in that best-available-sound format there was just enough added sonic bloom to provide a sense of both air and tonal nuance such as to make it far from a "straight" performance.
Notably, I was struck by how my beloved Andante sostenuto shimmered in the sonic luster of those "gold label" LPs, something I've never been aware of with my later CBS LP pressings or the CD edition. And in his collaboration with soloists, he can be heard bending enough to provide the kind of support each collaborator needed. So, no nonsense, but still a pretty diverse complement of musical tools. I think we can hear readily enough that these are far from cookie-cutter performances.
Obviously the recording that separates itself out to an extent is B, the Curzon-Szell, if only because it is with the London Symphony -- not known for plushness of sound, but still more apt than the Cleveland Orchestra to provide some tonal color and oomph (in Cleveland Szell could create lots of punch but maybe not so much oomph), and it is in Decca sound, with its penchant for tonal richness and contrast, rather than what we might call "Severance Hall severe" -- the kind of sound that CBS's recording team had learned Severance give and, more importantly, the kind of sound they were confident Szell wanted.
We've even got the interesting corollary examples of vintage-1953 Decca sound (the Curzon-van Beinum) and something of the famous "Philadelphia sound" Ormandy and Columbia-CBS were deservedly famous for. As presently planned, by the way, we're going to hear more Ormandy Brahms.
OUR GUEST COMMENTATOR TODAY IS . . .
While thinking about what to write, I found myself pawing through my LP holdings of the Brahms piano concertos, thinking that maybe I'd like to sample some of them, and also look at some of what the liner-note-writers had had to say. These days I'm more patient than I once was, less fussy about a commentator "accounting for" the music underquestion and more open to what glimmers of light the person may shine.
I guess I'd never read it because Osborne wasn't a favorite critic of mine, but in this case he seems to me to have good ears on the music, and I'm pressing him into service to guide us through the wilds of this hellacious movement. (I think we may want to return to him when we continue with the concerto's remaining movements.) It's all hand-typed, so apologies for typos, and also for the paragraphing and bold-face lead-ins I've provided to what appeared originally as an unbroken paragraph. For some of us perpetually hard-toiling readers, I think it may be easier to take in this way as we listen our way through the movement.
FYI: Osborne (born 1943) has been the music critic of the magazine The Oldie and "has contributed a music column to every issue of The Oldie since its foundation in 1992."
At one time it was fashionable to query Brahms's scoring of the opening paragraph, but could these people improve on the agitated trills, the jagged string lines, like lightning across a darkened landscape, the elegiac counter-subject so full of passionate regret? The Blitzkrieg returns, the strings driving forward and eventually achieving an all-important motif, part triumphant, part tragic, which appears in retrospect to be the lynch-pin of the whole movement. Then, almost uncannily, the driving string writing is calmed and transformed by the piano into a rapt, undulating first paragraph.
The leonine trills return on the piano, this time fading off into a new subject, the famous F major melody, beautifully "scored" for piano and a superb example of Brahms's unique skill in folding his thematic material into seemingly improvisatory piano writing -- the pivotal "horn" motif now flickering away in the right hand. Briefly, the music is bathed in autumnal warmth, horns and violas sound the leading motif, a solo violin adds its comment, and an oboe lulls the music into submission (did the critic who wrote of the work's "unrelieved Nordic bleakness" ever hear it?).
The development begins on piano alone with a battery of double octaves, building through compulsively to more trills and a re-working in distant keys of the mournful cantabile themes. After another angry outburst, the music says and dances capriciously until the orchestra achieves a superb D major climax -- superb, but abortive, for the piano has other ideas, hammering out the opening material in E-flat.
The working-out from this point is one of much richness and ingenuity, a broad expansive exploration which comes to rest on bare, reiterated drum-taps (shades of Beethoven's C minor Concerto) before the impassioned coda, with its blazing trumpets in the final four bars.
SO, WHAT'S OUR PLAN GOING FORWARD?
It's like this. I was pretty sure we weren't going to get through the Brahms D minor Concerto today, but I thought we might get farther along than this. I've got this idea that we might take a listen to the first movements of Brahms's three other concertos, which not only span his composing like but like his work in almost every form he composed in more than once, are extraordinarily, almost fetishistically different. I don't reallly mean the "fetish" thing. It can just feel that way because of Brahms's general horror of repeating himself. I don't know whether it's an additional compunction on his part but part of the load of responsibility that came with composing in the shadow of Beethoven, but he took everything he composed really seriously, even things like his folksong arrangements and the famous "Hungarian dance" settings, which aren't just fun to listen to but are, especially in the four-hand-piano originals, unfailingly ingenious in their workmanship.
We think of Brahms as the "classicist" in the Romantic age, the man who clung to the old forms. Which he did, but he never thought of those forms as prefab molds into which he could pour notes. Most often he was inventing the particular form that each movement of each work would take, and of course how all those movements would relate to each other in the whose works they formed.
So I'd still like to do that thing of spot-checking out the other three Brahms concertos, and we've still got two more movements of the First Piano Concerto to go through, though of course they're much shorter than the first movement; together, the Adagio and Rondo are about equal in length to the Maestoso. If we can get through that, we'll be ready to hear what we can hear in the First Symphony.
At some point I'll buckle down and cobble together a box that provides linked listings to all the posts in this series to add to each installment, which'll have to be updated to include subsequent installments.
UPDATE -- COMING SHORTLY: An "after-post" bearing proper samplings of not just the first two but all three of Brahms's piano quartets.
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"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]
"Perfs A-B-C" (+ 2 bonus perfs!) of i. Un poco sostenuto"Just a bit more teasing before we get to the main post . . ." [5/4/2021]
Perfs of 2 Mystery Movements (Brahms 1: ii. Andante sostenuto, iii. Un poco allegretto e grazioso) by Toscanini, Mackerras, Bernstein"Post tease: How do we -- or maybe I mean how did Brahms -- get to this from this?" [5/2/2021]
Start and finish of Mystery Movement (Brahms 1: ii. Andante sostenuto). Perfs by Walter, Herbig, Barbirolli, Furtwängler, Celibidache, Toscanini
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