Of course it was possible for the young Brahms to be aware of Chopin's scherzos and ballades without in any way imitating them

[With assorted strategic Monday-morning touching up]

Plus, we get to have some fun with Weber's Oberon Overture
and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music (than
which musical wonderfulness doesn't come any wonderfuller)

Given Brahms's reverance for the great masters who preceded him, and in particular one who had revolutionized the way composers could think about the piano, how could he not have been keenly aware of Chopin?

"Johannes Brahms began his musical life studying the piano, and his earliest, truly great compositions were solo piano works, both presented here. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, is the earliest surviving composition by Brahms. He wrote it in November 1851 when he was 18 and published it as Op. 4, rather than Op. 1, because, he explained to a friend, “when one shows one's self for the first time, people must first see the head and not the feet.” Musical scholars feel that, despite the composer’s denial, it obviously shows a “dependence” on Chopin’s scherzi, and quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling at bar 46 as well."

-- from an online note accompanying a listing for Yefim Bronfman's early recording of Op. 4 (the Scherzo) and Op. 5 (the F minor Piano Sonata)

SO, HERE AGAIN IS HOW BRAHMS'S SCHERZO GOES
(in two performances we haven't heard before and one we have)

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


Yefim Bronfman, piano. MusicMasters, recorded c1986

Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead (London), 1964

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

I'll have something to say about the performances farther down. For now, I suggest keeping in mind the ages of the pianists at the time of recording -- roughly 28, 38, and 62. Turns out, it seems to matter.

by Ken

In a moment we're going to hear how a Chopin scherzo goes. But first let me say that it's been a good week for me, musically and in other ways as well, I guess. (Funny how the two often go together!) After a couple of years in which it was all but impossible for me to listen to music on my aging computer, which I imagined was suffering from some likely fatal hardware or at least heart-stoppingly expensive malady whose repair would likely cost almost as much as replacing the poor old computer, well --

Long story short (I actually started writing the whole story before just chucking it, since what interest could it have for anybody but me?), like magic I managed to solve all the problems, and then some, and suddenly I found myself with wonderful music pouring forth from both my computers. It used to be that even when I was most depressed about the purposelessness of these posts, the music revived me. So lately I've been allowing myself to wallow a bit in the pleasure of all this music, and later in this post we're going to allow it ourselves the luxury of some pleasurable musical wallowing.


NOW HERE'S HOW A CHOPIN SCHERZO GOES
(via a Czech, a Hungarian, and of course the Pole -- thrice over!)

Ghost of Sunday Classics: "Kaleidoscope" -- a fondly remembered LP happily holds up under decades-later scrutiny

HOW DO WE GET FROM POINT A TO B TO C?

Point A, the opening of the piece (as heard last night):

Shortly we'll hear how we get from there to Point B:

However, Point B leads directly into Point C:

London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961

by Ken

Last week I reported my discovery of a hidden treasure trove (free!) of overtures, F. Reeder's Internet Archive compendium of "Overtures - Recorded 1926-1847)" -- 33 mp3 transfers of 29 overtures conducted by 18 conductors, most of them legendary (e.g., Barbirolli, Beecham, Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Mitropoulos, Reiner, Rodzinski, Toscanini, Walter, Weingartner). That helped nudge me into an overtury mood. I recalled that a happy heap of my listening over the years has been to recorded collections of overtures and related short orchestral pieces.

As I mentioned, this mood inspired me to finally order CD issues of material that had once been part of my "go to" listening material. As a result, we're not going to do much with the Reeder treasure trove this week, but we'll come back to it. Also, I should mention that in a February 2011 post I already flashed back to one of those treasured overture discs, the Capitol Paperback Classics reissue of Erich Leinsdorf's wonderful c1958 catchily titled Opera Overtures LP with the Philharmonia, augmented on CD with some fine overture performances by Felix Slatkin and Miklós Rózsa.

Another of those LPs sprang back to life with the arrival of those ordered CDs: a Mercury Living Presence CD reincarnation of sorts of Charles Mackerras's Philips LP Kaleidoscope. What we heard in last night's preview was the music that more than anything made me fall in love with the original Kaleidoscope. The CD isn't the original Kaleidoscope, exactly. On it material from two LPs is smooshed together (from the Kaleidoscope LP everything is here except two additional Brahms Hungarian Dances, a minimal loss), all recorded at the same time by the legendary Mercury "Living Presence" team of Wilma Cozart Fine, recording director; Harold Lawrence, musical supervisor; and C. Robert Fine, chief engineer and technical supervisor. The domestic Philips LP was in effect a "Living Presence" LP, which explains why it sounded so good. Unfortunately as with the general run of domestic Philips pressings, it could be, well, problematic -- my copy came badly warped.

But that didn't stop me from listening to it a few zillion times, especially the piece we began hearing last night. What we heard was the hushed, haunting opening -- "Point A" in the A-to-B-to-C sequence above. Now here's the whole thing, starting with the Mackerras recording. Then we have that wise old German hand Robert Heger (from a complete Merry Wives recording) and vintage Herbert von Karajan, plus a dip into the F. Reeder overture grab bag, turning up a conductor now hardly known, Nikolai Sokoloff (1886-1965), who does a pretty nice job while squeezing the thing onto one 78 side.

NICOLAI: The Merry Wives of Windsor: Overture


London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961

Bavarian State Orchestra, Robert Heger, cond. EMI, recorded 1964

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded c1959

[trimmed (and rushed) to fit on one 78 side] Cleveland Orchestra, Nikolai Sokoloff, cond. Brunswick, recorded May 1927 (digital transfer by F. Reeder)


A CONDUCTOR NOT SO EASY TO "TYPE"

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (3) -- Overtures Plus, part 1

Act III of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz

Huntsmen's Chorus
What pleasure on earth can compare with the hunter's?
Whose cup of life sparkles so richly?
To lie in the verdure while the horns sound,
To follow the stag through thicket and pond,
Is joy for a prince, is a real man's desire,
Is strengthens your limbs and spices your food.
When woods and rocks resound all about us,
A full goblet sings a freer and happier song!
Yo ho! Tralala!

Diana is present to brighten the night;
Her darkness cools us like any refreshment in the day.
To fell the bloody wolf, and the boar
who greedily roots through the green crops,
Is joy for a prince, is real man's desire,
It strengthens your limbs and spices your food.
When woods and rocks resound all about us,
A full goblet sings a freer and happier song!
Yo, ho! Tralala!

Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1959

by Ken

Do I need an excuse for bringing back the "Huntsmen's Chorus" from Act III of Der Freischütz? I love it. It's another of this musical bits I can listen to over and over and over. (This isn't theoretical. I've done it a bunch of times, usually along with the preceding Entr'acte, which works the same material in purely orchestral form.)

Looking back, I rather admire the audacity with which I first slipped these goodies into Part 5 of the "Remembering Margaret Price" series, on the pretext that we were hearing Dame Margaret sing Agathe's grand Act II aria "Leise, leise" as well as the following trio and Agathe's Act III cavatina. We also heard the performance of the Freischütz Overture we're about to rehear, along with a bunch of other performances of it. It is, of course, a glorious piece, from its brooding and fraught beginnings to its giddily triumphant conclusion, anticipating the joyful concluding section of Agathe's "Leise, leise."

WEBER: Der Freischütz:
Overture

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1959

For those just coming in at the point, we're continuing a mostly archival (from the Sunday Classics archives, that is) remembrance of that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987). Last week we focused on his concert work, specifically on two very different composers for whom he had a remarkable affinity, Haydn and Bruckner. This week we're moving on to his operatic work.

THE FREISCHÜTZ OVERTURE STRADDLES THE DIVIDE

It's probably heard more often in the concert hall than in the opera house. I don't know that Jochum would have conducted it any differently as a concert piece, but I do think it makes a difference atmosphere-wise that he was thinking of it here in its context as a curtain-raiser for the opera. The performance seems to me to work fine either way.