Recorded 1980, Berliner Philharmonie – Berlin, West Germany
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
One word – ROUSING!
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Richard Osborne
“Listen to the music with reverence; for the composer meant what he said, and he was speaking of sacred things,” wrote Sir Donald Tovey of the Sixth Symphony’sslow movement.
It is well said, for this is wise and compassionate music, Sachs-like in its broodings. Tovey’s advocacy of the symphony in the early years of the century was remarkable then and would be remarkable now, for the Sixth– personal, economical, thrillingly shaped and scored – has never been much noticed by the wider musical public.
Anton Bruckner
During Bruckner’s lifetime only the Adagioand Scherzoof the Symphony were known. Wilhelm Jahn, director of the Vienna Hofoper, had conducted these two movements, to considerable acclaim, at a Philharmonic concert in Vienna in February 1883, seventeen months after the work’s completion.
But it was Gustav Mahler who brought the full score to public notice (albeit with cuts in some of the third subject groups and some revised orchestration) at a concert in Vienna in February 1899.
Mahler had long wanted to present a Bruckner symphony to the Philharmonic audience, and his choice was as enterprising as it was inspired. One wonders what Mahler made of the work in performance.
He was himself to write slow movements of omparable beauty, but his dance movements, with their persistent nostalgia, their recurrent irony, and their sophisticated orchestral method rarely, if ever, attempt to re-appropriate and re-fashion the classical scherzo as fascinatingly as Bruckner does.
Bruckner’s Trio, with its woodland horns and haunting sense of an Urwald far distant in time from our own, is a minor masterpiece in itself.
Like the trudging start to the Scherzo (which may or may not have given Mahler a germinal idea for his own Sixth Symphony), Bruckner’s music is rooted in certainties which Mahler all too rarely glimpsed.
Bruckner’s two outer movements are incluctably splendid; but they, too, follow a ground-plan, and an orchestral procedure, radically different from anything we encounter in Mahler.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
Spacioius in design, swift in process, without a spare ounce of flesh on the orchestral texturing, the finale searches out the tonic A major– the key briefly burked out by trumpets and horns in bar 23 of the movement across a quietened, minor-key, nocturnal landscape.
During the course of the movement there are many arrivals on precipitate tonal steeps, as well as blander, blanket moments, abortive fermatas marking journey’s end.
“In Bruckner,” Robert Simpson has brilliantly observed, “the unexpected is inevitable, and the inevitable totally unexpected.” This is certainly true of the Sixth’sfinale. Its mood is by turns furtive, heroic, feverish, serene and assertive. Never, though, is it despairing. It is a movment marked by a heroic refusal to contemplate victory until all the possibilities of defeat have been squarely faced. Onlly out of doubt is faith born.
Berliner Philharmoniker
The first movement is almost unequivocally splendid! Is there a recapitulation in the history of the symphony between Beethoven and Silelius more unexpected or more thrilling that that at the heart of this particular movment?
The use of the drum is Beethovenian both as an harmonic pivot and as a source of awesome splendor in the orchestral texture; but though the effects are Beethovenian in origin they are entirely Brucknerian in their application.
Earlier, the movement begins with the note of C sharp pulsing like rapid morse high on the violins – though the crucial ideas are held, with typical Brucknerian reticence, low in the cellos and basses.
Herbert Von Karajan
Here, within a characteristically plain tonic and dominant ambit, an array of highly charged Neopolitan harmoniers give the music its special charisma, just as broad rhythmic formulations are soon to give focus to the exquisite lyrical episodes, the music made magical by the arcane loveliness of the kaleidoscopically changing inner rhythmic fragments.
By the code, as Tovey eloquently observes, the thematic inversions are ‘passing from key to key beneath a tumultuous surface, sparkling like the Homeric seas.’
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 6 in A Major
Majestoso [15:16]
Adagio: Sehr feierlich [18:58]
Scherzo: Nicht schnell – Trio, Langsam [7:52]
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell [15:13]
FINAL THOUGHT:
If you’ve decided to listen to some Brucknertoday – start with this one. Your heart rate will rise. Most doctors say Bruckner’s 6th equals one hour of cardio.
Recorded January 20 and 21, 1991 – Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
There are reasons why many people and critics are not fans of Bruckner’s 5thSymphony, this performance by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Christoph Von Dohnanyi is not one them.
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Mark Audus
The Fifth is at once the most compelling and forbidding of Bruckner’s symphonies. The Finaleis one of the crowning glories of symphonic literature, but the road to it is fraught with pitfalls for the weak of heart.
Passages of blazing glory rub shoulders with others of great austerity: rich sonorities stand next to spare counterpoint, and earthy dance-music next to sublime lyricism. Such antitheses – hallmarks of all Brucker’s mature music – are particularly marked here and perhaps explain why this, one of the greatest of his symphonies, has never been among the best-loved.
Anton Bruckner at the piano
The composer himself may have recognized his exceptional achievement in the Fifth; and recounted to Richard Wagner: “Dr. Liszt played through my Fifth Symphony, and ‘proclaimed’ (his own words!) my virtues to [Prince] Hohenlohe, ‘My only consolation in Vienna!'”
Yet even Bruckner’s friends seem to have been daunted by the work, and it received only two performances in Bruckner’s lifetime; the first on April 20, 1887 (almost ten years after its completion) in an arrangement for two pianos by Josef Schalk, and the second on April 9, 1894 in a heavily cut and edited version by Franz Schalk (still to be heard until relatively recently) which the composer was mercifully too ill to attend.
Lying at the center of Bruckner’s symphonic oevre, the Fifth seems both to close the door on the early symphonies and to look forward to the mighty world of the late works. Indeed, a number of writers have described it as Janus-like, a metaphor that can be extended beyond the scope of Bruckner’s own works to that of a wider music history. For it seems as once to look back to the worlds of Classicism and the Baroque and forward to a new kind of music which fuses counterpoint and symphonic form.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
The Janus metaphor may be applied on many levels, although the Fifth is full of thematic cross-references between the movements, the most obvious are between the second and third (both of which start with the same motif at different speeds) and the first and last – suggesting a symmetrical layout.
Such an observation is corroborated by the proportions of the of the movements, which are more evenly balanced than the beginning-heavy Seventh and the end-heavy Eighth. We might even suggest that Bruckner composed the work ‘inside out.’
Composition began (on February 14, 1875) with the Adagio, followed by the first movement, the Scherzoand Trio, and the Finale(May 1877). Subsequent revisions brought Bruckner full-circle to complete the Adagioby January 4, 1878.
Bruckner dedicated the Fifth Symphony to ‘his Excellency Herr Carl von Stremayr, Imperial Minister for Culture And Education.’ This is particularly appropriate, for not only did Stremayr help secure Bruckner a professorship in harmony and counterpoint at Vienna University, but this is also the most ‘learned’ of Bruckner’s symphonies.
It is difficult to apply the term ‘programme music’ in the conventional sense to any of these works, the Fourth comes the closest, but the Fifth lays greater claim to the description of ‘absolute music.’
The beginning of the slow introduction – unique in Bruckner’s symphonies and itself a ‘Classical’ feature – can almost be heard in terms of an exercise in species counterpoint. Both the introduction and the following Allegroseem to be ‘about’ avoiding the implied tonic chord, so that even the first subject quickly veers to the minor mode, and though the tonic is finally achieved, the whole movement still has an introductory feel about it.
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 5in B Flat Major
Introduction: Adagio – Allegro [19:41]
Sehr langsam [18:10]
Scherzo: Molto vivace – Trio [13:05]
Finale: Allegro molto [22:53]
FINAL THOUGHT:
I mean, definitely not my go to when I have a hankering for Bruckner. That said, it does have some damn fine rousing moments!
Recorded 1970, Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin, Germany; Remastered 1987
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I mean, it’s Bruckner, it’s von Karajan, and it’s the Berliner Philharmoniker… what could go wrong? Not much.
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Peter Branscombe, 1985
Bruckner wrote his Fourth Symphony in 1874, but between 1878 and 1880 he revised it twice, completely replacing the scherzo and finale. In its new form the work was successfully performed at a Vienna Philharmonic concert under Hans Richter on February 20, 1881. The symphony was nevertheless subjected to further reworkings in 1886 and 1887-1888, but it is in the 1878-80 version that it is normally heard.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
I. Bewegt, nict zu schnell: Over shimmering ppp strings there rings out the horn-call that will dominate the first movement and return at the end of the finale. With a typical two-plus-three rising figure Bruckner introduces his second thematic complex. A sonorous tutti gives way to a woodbird call in the violins.
The development ranges from the quietest of woodland musings to the full roar of striding tutti and resonant chorale, and the recapitulation creates the impression of a familiar landscape viewed from a new vantage point. Though the coda steals in quietly, even menacingly, this is to be a passage of the utmost splendor.
Anton Bruckner
II. Andante quasi Allegretto: Although the typical Bruckner Adagio lies in the future, there is a solemnity about this lovely movement that on its own terms is quite as impressive.
Cello cantilena, a quiet chorale and a beautiful viola melody prove the principal material for this boldly modulating, questing movement. The principal theme is heard for the last time in the coda. Then, after a powerful climax, the movement dies away with tonic and dominant timpani-taps and pizzicato chords.
Herbert von Karajan
III. Scherzo – Bewegt: There is no precedent for the splendid ‘hunting’ Scherzowhich – along in Bruckner’s symphonies – is in 2/4 rather than 3/4 time.
In two-plus-three rhythm the horns launch their calls ever more intensely above hazy strings; the heavy brass join in before a gentler string response, but there are also eerie phrases to come. The Trio, Nicht zu schnell, Keinesfalls schleppend, presents a magical period of calm; the sudden shift back to the reprise of the Scherzois an exciting moment.
Berliner Philharmoniker
IV. Finale: Bewegt, doch nict zu schnell: The movement opens in an ominous B-flat minor, with clarinets and first horn enunciating a falling three-note figure which will become important at the first tutti, where it is answered by the two-plus-three note-pattern that has already been remarked on.
This powerful paragraph (it looks back to the theme of the Scherzoand the rhythm of the opening movement) closes in a firm E-flat; a drop in tempo users in the second subject on the upper strings, in C minor.
The C major theme that comes next is almost vacuous by comparison, and what follows reveals that Bruckner has not yet attained full master of the symphonic finale.
The coda, however, is a wonderful achievement; horns emerge from a wash of woodwind to stride purposefully towards a majestic final peroration.
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 4in E-Flat Minor – ‘Romantic’
Bewegt, nicht zu schnell – 20:37
Andante quasi Allegretto – 15:28
Scherzo: Bewegt – Trio, Nicht zu schnell, Keinesfalls schleppend – 10:33
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell – 23:02
FINAL THOUGHT:
Don’t like the piece? Fine. Don’t really like Bruckner? Okie-dokie. But this performance cannot be denied. A perfect match of music, conductor and orchestra.
Recording Location: Het Concertgebouw, December 1994 – Live Recording
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Now we’re talking!
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – “Anton Bruckner: An Antenna Pointing Into The 20th Century” – Nikolaus Harnoncourt In Conversation With Walter Dobner
W.D.: According to one 19th-Century review of the Third Symphony, “Bruckner has his moments -flashes of imagination of a kind found only with great men on genius – but they are soon past.” I don’t suppose you share this view, Herr Harnoncourt?
N.H.: Not for a moment. But nor do I share the view of contemporary critics of Beethoven’s Second Symphony. None the less, there’s some truth in the suggestion that a transcendent genius like Bruckner – or any other great composer for that matter – positively invites disapproval and criticism. You can’t expect people to agree completely with such music.
The whole meaning of a work is revealed only by contradiction. It’s only when you ask what happens between these flashes of genius that you may find a lot happening that may not appear so brilliant after all.
There was a time when I myself saw Bruckner in this light. I felt I was returning home from a Bruckner symphony with a relatively small number of very important discoveries. But the symphonies were too great for that.
Today, I’ve changed my mind completely, since I now understand much better what this music is all about.
Anton Bruckner
W.D.: Can you say in a few words what you mean by that?
N.H.: The experience I had with Bruckner was similar to the one I had with Beethoven. I initially had great problems with the finale of both the Ninth Symphony and Fidelio. They struck me as too distended and, in consequence, as seriously lacking in substance. Only later did it become clear to me that I was approaching this music with the wrong standard.
In the case of the Missa solemnis I suddenly saw that it was simply absurd to judge Beethoven by Mozart’s standards. Beethoven makes other demands , asks other questions and so he got other answers. As soon as I set aside my “Mozart” yardstick and found one that seemed to me better suited to Beethoven, I suddenly discovered a whole new approach to his works.
Exactly the same thing happened with Bruckner. The more I got to know Brahms, the more precious Bruckner became. It was presumably the great effort and seriousness of Brahm’s writing that produced such wonderful results after years of polishing and honing and that led me to his antithetical opposite, Bruckner, bringing him closer and closer to me.
W.D.: Is Bruckner not also so difficult to understand because there are so many different links? Although his music speaks the language of the 19th century, it is also deeply indebted on a formal level to the Classical 18th century, to say, nothing of the gestures – and mysticism – of the Middle Ages.
N.H.: Curiously enough, Bruckner strikes me – far more than any other composer of his generation – as someone with an antenna pointing into the 20th century. When people claim that it was Mahler who laid the foundation of the Second Viennese School, I have to say that this seems to me to have been even more true of Bruckner – not that I would want to disagree with any of the criteria you’ve listed.
Those aspects that go back to the Middle Ages are presumably tied up in some way with Bruckner’s markedly rustic character. But I don’t think it’s possible to approach his works from a biographical standpoint. If you were to start out from Bruckner’s personality, you’d expect to find extreme conservatism in his works. But his visions really can’t be squared with his simplicity as a person. In this respect, he is unique as a genius.
W.D.: But is it really possible to draw a total distinction between Bruckner as a person and Bruckner as a composer? Shouldn’t the thematic triality of his symphonic movements be seen not only as a symbol of the Trinity but also as evidence of Bruckner’s personal faith? What are your thoughts on this and on the theory that only a believer can interpret Bruckner?
N.H.: I don’t think faith comes into it. Anyone who performs Bruckner needs to be familiar with Austrian music, with Schubert, with peasant music and the whole ländler thing. I wouldn’t dare try to find evidence of Bruckner’s religious beliefs in the symbols of his music.
It may well be that these signs of personal belief does exist, but biographers, exegetes and musicologists who explain this only on the basis of the works, without the composer’s say so, are guilty, I believe, of venturing into a highly dangerous and highly speculative area.
For me, Brucker’s symphonies are couched in a language of musical sounds that is his very own, personal language. That his personality was very strongly influenced by his faith is sufficiently well attested. Whether his music would sound different without this pronounced religious influence, I don’t think any of us can say. But I think it’s far too simple as an explanation to derive this thematic triality from the Trinity.
W.D.: The ‘Musician of God,’ is only one of many Brucknerian cliches. Bruckner is also sometimes regarded as a typically Austrian composer. It’s argued that he takes his place in a line beginning with Schubert and leading to Mahler and, finally, to Schoenberg.
N.H.: I’d describe only highly concrete details of his music as typically Austrian, for example, the Triosin his Scherzosand a few melodic ideas that I associate with Bruckner’s rustic origins or with elements of Austrian folk music.
With Schubert, it’s totally different – he could only be Austrian, his music speaks Viennese dialect. The line of development that starts out with Schubert certainly leads in Bruckner’s general direction, but it actually goes, rather, to Johann Strauss; that’s pure unadulterated Austrian music for you.
There seems to me a very clear line of development from Bruckner to the Second Viennese School, especially to Alban Berg, rather less so to Schoenberg, although Schoenberg often transcribed Strauss.
I’m happy to leave out Mahler – he’s really not conceivable without Bruckner. I regard Bruckner’s music as absolute. The autobiographical element in his music isn’t all that marked. Unlike Mahler, who uses Bruckner’s vocabulary, Bruckner does not retell his own life in a superficial way. I see a basic difference between a composer who sees himself as the agent of his talent and one who uses the vocabulary of a composer like Bruckner in order to tell us all about his private sufferings.
W.D.: Herr Harnoncourt, you say that Mahler is inconceivable without Bruckner. Is Bruckner conceivable without Wagner?
N.H.: Certainly. The links between Bruckner and Wagner must have been in the air at the time. You can already hear Wagner and Tchaikovsky in a number of Mendelssohn’s works – I’m thinking of Die erste Walpurgisnacht and Die schöne Melusine. Virtually the whole of the 19th century is contained in these works.
One has the feeling that if Mendelssohn had had a normal lifespan, Wagner would have been inhibited by such proximity. I don’t think there is anything in Wagner’s musical language that wasn’t already part of the spirit of the times. Wagner had to exist in the 19th century. Bruckner had to exist as a writer of symphonies, not as a music dramatist. The fact that Bruckner revered Wagner I see as a sign of his modesty.
W.D.: Herr Harnoncourt, you’re beginning your explanation of the world of Bruckner’s symphonies with his Third Symphony, of which there are three different versions. Why did you opt for the second version?
N.H.: The final version was ruled out for me on account of its excessive cuts and excisions that almost destroy the work’s organic unity. For me, it’s a makeshift solution designed to keep the symphony in the running, as it were.
The first version is very complex and rambling, with a lot of Wagnerian quotations. I could well imagine conducting this first version after extensive preparation. I see the second version as the result of Bruckner’s wrestling with the first one. Also, I think that the coda to the Scherzoprovides a very interesting and convincing ending here. I think Brucker knew perfectly well how he imagined his works would sound and that he set this down quite clearly.
He said: “My work is in the score.” But although he worked on the score, he did not – so to speak – prepare it in bite-sized morsels. The versions that various friends and conductors forced out of him were concessions to these friends and to audiences, prompted by the wish to be performed at all.
W.D.: And which edition of this symphony did you decide to use for your own performance?
N.H.: I’m conducting the second version in Nowak’s edition, since it’s the one I find most convincing. You must never forget that fashion plays an important part here, too. Now that we’re familiar with Nowak’s versions, we know how he arrived at his findings. The sources are available.
Of course, one could now try reaching one’s own conclusions and results on the strength of the sources. That’s the prerogative of every generation. I trusted Nowak more than I normally trust editors and haven’t reexamined every question on the basis of the sources in order to make my own decisions, but compared the various findings of the individual editions.
I also consulted an edition from the Concergebouw Orchestra, with whom I made this recording, since I also wanted to learn more about this orchestra’s tradition.
W.D.: Not only the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra can look back on a long tradition of performing Bruckner, so, too, can the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, with whom you began your career as a musician. They, too, have considerable experience of playing Bruckner’s works. To what extent was this knowledge of the performing tradition of use to you during your present involvement with Bruckner, or did you fell inhibited by it?
N.H.: These experiences were of great use to me and certainly didn’t inhibit me. The older I get, the more natural Bruckner’s musical language seems to me. I feel at home here, it’s the element in which I live and breathe. I can recall some very great performances of Bruckner while I was a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
I’m thinking in particular of Karajan during the 1950s. I’d be interested to hear those performances again and would like to know whether my experience at that time – I’d not yet turned thirty – would stand up to my present understanding. But they left an indelible impression on me.
In the case of the present performance, it was important for me to work with an orchestra that knows and understands Bruckner’s language. At the same time, of course, I had to fight against this experience at rehearsals, since there are certain passages that are interpreted in identical ways by virtually every conductor.
I’m thinking, for example, of the decelerandos, especially in the slow movement of the Third Symphony; the answers in the orchestra are almost always taken twice as slowly as the questions. There isn’t the slightest indication in the score that this is how these passages should be taken. And yet orchestras are used to playing them like this.
But when a composer like Bruckner writes even the tiniest change of tempo into the score and when he prescribes even the least expressive nuance by means of footnotes and explanations, I’m tempted to agree with him and included to clear away all this ballast.
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Within twenty-four hours of his meeting with Wagner in Bayreuth in September 1873, Anton Bruckner could no longer remember whether the Master had accepted the dedication of his Secondor Third Symphony.
Remarkable though this lapse must seem, contemporary accounts make it plain that Bruckner’s uncertainty was due not so much to his awesome encounter with a man whom he revered as “the master of all masters” as to the vast amounts of beer that he and Wagner had consumed.
With his memory of this historic encounter decidedly befuddled, Bruckner sent the older composer a note in an attempt to resolve the matter. “Symphony in D minor, where the trumpet begins the theme?,” he asked, to which Wagner appended his reply: “Yes, yes! Best wishes!”
The first draft of the score was completed by the end of the year, and Cosima Wagner confirmed receipt of the dedication copy on June 24, 1874. Shortly afterwards, Brucker offered his new symphony to the Vienna Philharmonic, but the orchestra rejected the piece after a trial run-through in the autumn of 1875.
As with so many of Bruckner’s works, the original version of the score proved only the starting point of a whole series of major revisions.
The ink on the dedication copy was scarcely dry before Bruckner had already set out to make ‘significant improvements to the Wagner Symphony (in D minor),’ to quote from a letter to Moritz von Mayfeld, but the result was not yet an independent version, for this, we have to wait until the thoroughgoing version of 1876/77, when Brucker added the ‘Adagio No. 2′ (1876) and produced an intermediate version that occupies a halfway house between the first and second versions. (As a result, there are a total of four versions of the slow movement – something of a rarity in the history of music – and three different versions of the symphony as a whole.)
On April 28, 1877, Bruckner finally added a note to the concluding movement ‘entirely new revision finished.’ The second version, Bruckner though, was now complete.
The work was premiered in this form in December 1877 and, notoriously, proved a failure. But Bruckner refused to be daunted and in January 1878 made a further series of changes to this second version, including the addition of a coda to the Scherzo. The second major revision dates from 1888/89, when Franz Schalk played a decisive role and incurred the charge of ‘foreign interference’ in the score. In this revised form the work found favor with its audiences.
The question of “failure” and “success” lead us straight to the heart of the problems surrounding the different versions. To a certain extent we are dealing here with “improvements” designed to accommodate the work to audience expectations. There is no doubt that Bruckner craved success and constantly sought recognition, avidly reading reviews. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion, therefore, that it was only those works that had proved an initial failure that were subjected to a process of revision, either by Bruckner himself or by others.
(It is surely significant in this context that the Seventh Symphony, with which the composer made his international breakthrough, was left untouched.) Legion are Bruckner’s remarks reflecting his conformist outlook and his willingness to make concessions.
In consequence, the various versions are assessed in different ways by musicians and scholars. For some, the principal aspect is the process of improvement, whereas others acknowledge the independence of each individual version.
It is important to realize that the changes should not be approached from a purely qualitative standpoint but must be examined in the light of the circumstances that produced them and the period at which they were made. Give the length of time that Bruckner devoted to the Third Symphony – a total of sixteen years – it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a ‘work in progress.’
In what ways do the three versions differ? This question is normally answered by reference to cuts, although this affects only one, albeit important, aspect. A comparison of the overall length of the symphony in all three versions reveals that, whereas the first version is 2056 bars long, the second runs to 1815 bars and the third is 1644 bars in length. But even here we must proceed with caution since the cuts do not affect all the movements equally. The Scherzois the exception to the rule inasmuch as it is eight bars longer in the second and third versions.
Further changes affect the structure of the musical periods, a process that Bruckner himself called ‘rhythmic ordering.’ In the transitions he strove to achieve a greater interweaving of the motifs, with denser textures in the long ascents to climaxes that so often fail to materialize.
He also altered the accompanying figures and instrumentation. In the case of the Third Symphony, there is also the question of Bruckner’s collage-like use of fifteen Wagnerian quotations, the vast majority of which had already disappeared by the time of the second version, a change no doubt dictated by the composer’s wish to reduce the work’s powerfully subjective content and, at the same time, emphasize its autonomy.
The second version is closely tied up wit the Concertgebouw’s Brucknerian tradition; the Third Symphony was the first of the composer’s symphonies to be played by the Amsterdam orchestra, when Willem Kes conducted a performance on October 13, 1892.
In 1897, Willem Mengelberg conducted the local premiere of the Fourth Symphony, and the Ninthwas introduced to Amsterdam audiences in 1908. A period of particularly intense interest in Bruckner began with Eduard van Beinum, who was appointed the Concertgebouw’s second conductor in 1931 and who once said of the composer: ‘Bruckner is my daily bread. I can never get enough of his music.’
Many outstanding performances of Bruckner’s symphonies too place under van Beinum’s baton, although they continued to be based on the seriously deficient first editions of the scores. Only slowly was Robert Haas’s old Bruckner Edition of the 1930s adopted.
In the sixties, Eugen Jochum and Bernard Haitink showed themselves to be Brucknerians of the first rank. While Jochum soon came to prefer Nowak’s new edition, Haitink remained loyal to Haas. Haitink was succeeded in 1988 by Riccardo Chailly, who has continued the Concertgebouw’s longstanding – and outstanding – Bruckner tradition.
Erich W. Partsch
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 3 in D Minor – “Wagner”
Gemäßigt, mehr bewegt, misterioso – 19:29
Andante: Bewegt, feierlich, quasi Adagio – 13:26
Scherzo: Zeimlich schnell – 7:02
Finale: Allegro – 14:37
FINAL THOUGHT:
Insanely long liner notes not withstanding, Bruckner’s Third Symphony is the one that turned the world in favor of Bruckner. And, thank God. If Bruckner’s 6th didn’t exist – it would have really sucked.
Male Voices: Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Ernst-Senff-Chor
Berliner Philharmoniker
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
A nice performance of a ‘meh’ Symphony (which, I believe, would have been Bruckner’s review as well).
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Sebastian Urmoneit (Translation Stewart Spencer)
Dating from 1865/66, Bruckner’s C minor Symphony was the Austrian composer’s first attempt to explore a field which, in the minds of all 19th-century composers of instrumental music, represented the ultimate challenge.
Neither his “Study Symphony” in F Minor, nor his D Minor Symphony which he himself later “nullified,” satisfied the high standards he set himself and that he expected of the genre.
As we know, Brahms, too, hesitated long and hard before publishing a symphony, and by the time that his first contribution to the medium was unveiled, he was already well established as a composer.
Bruckner, by contrast, was barely known outside Linz in the mid-1860s, even though he had already completed two Masses. According to his own later account, it was the local music critic, Moritz von Mayfeld, who encouraged him to explore the world of the symphony, a world to which Bruckner was to remain loyal for the whole of the rest of his life.
Mayfeld ended his review of the first performance of Bruckner’s D minor Mass with the words: “Such is his unusually fertile imagination and his musical and technical knowledge that it is hard to predict where he may go from here. But one thing is certain, namely, that he will very soon cultivate the field of the symphony and to do so, moreover, with the greatest success.”
Anton Bruckner
We know that from at least the time of his studies with the Linz Kappelmeister, Otto Kitzler, Bruckner was not only familiar with the music of Beethoven but had also been introduced to the opera of Wagner through a performance of “Tannhauser” that Kitzler conducted at the theatre in the town.
From Beethoven, Bruckner took over the symphony’s four-movement structure and even left untouched the distinctive character of all four of those movements: First movement Sonataform – Adagio– Scherzo– Finale.
From his First Symphony onwards, however, he based his symphonic expositions not one two subjects but on three; a compositional device previously found to such a clearly developed extent only in Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony.
A comparison between the two First Symphonies of Bruckner and Brahms shows certain similarities; not only are both in C Minor, but the sombre tonality of the opening is brightened in their final movements, both of which are in C Major.
In each case, the model is Beethoven’s Fifth. More striking than their similarities, however, are their dissimilarities, not least in their approach to the whole history of the genre.
Daniel Barenboim
In order for it to be fully understood, Brahms’ First Symphony seems to presuppose two whole centuries of music history as a living force, whereas Bruckner approached his task with an almost naïve insouciance, seeming not to suffer from the oppressive weight of tradition.
While his First Symphony is far from denying the age in which it was written, no other composer of his stature has been able to animate the elemental forces of rhythm and melody with such unrefracted immediacy and – at least in his First Symphony – to fall back so nonchalantly on Wagner’s harmonic innovations.
The German musicologist Stefan Kuntz has characterized this note of purity in early Bruckner by reference to a remark of Nietzsche’s which, although written with Wagner in mind, is undoubtedly better suited, in Kunze’s view, to Bruckner: “He who desired to liberate art, to restore its desecrated sanctity, would first have to have liberated himself from the modern soul; only when innocent himself could he discover the innocence of art.”(Untimely Meditations: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.)
This natural simplicity of tone is a feature, above all, of the original Linz version of the symphony, a more elemental account of the piece that Bruckner later revised in 1890/91 to produce the so-called Vienna version of the work.
Rundfunkchor Berlin
The symphonic chorus Helgolandfor male-voice choir and orchestra was Bruckner’s last completed composition. The only other piece on which he worked after 1893 was his Ninth Symphony, which was to remain unfinished at his death.
Although Helgolandis little known today, it is clear from Bruckner’s last will and testament that he himself numbered it among his most important works, worth – in his opinion – of being ranked alongside his nine symphonies, three Masses, String Quintet, Te Deum and his setting of Psalm 150.
Bruckner was happy to accept the commission to write Helgolandand broke off work on his Ninth Symphonyin order to concentrate on a piece that he hoped would increase his standing in musical circles. It was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Vienna Male-Voice Choir, a celebration that the Emperor Franz Joseph I was to attend in person.
Its first performance on 8 October 1893 proved one of the great triumphs in Bruckner’s career. It is no longer possible to say with any certainty whether the decision to set the ballad by August Silberstein (1827-1900) was Bruckner’s own or whether that decision was taken by others.
The poem breathes the spirit of German nationalism that typified the educated Austrian bourgeoisie from the mid-19th century onwards and which singing societies – the Liedertafelnof the time – made it their duty to promulgate.
Ernst-Senff-Chor Berlin
Silberstein was numbered among the student dissidents of 1848 and driven into exile, settling in Vienna in 1856 and making his living as a journalist and occasional poet.
Silberstein’s ballade Helgolandis taken from an anthology, Mein Herz in Liedern, first published in 1868 and describes the threat posed to the island of Helgoland by a fleet of Roman warships. The Saxon islanders call on Heaven to help them, and assistance is duly provided in the form of a raging tempest. The pagan invasion is repulsed, and the Germanic people thank God for their deliverance.
The events depicted in the poem are purely fictional: the Romans never reached Helgoland, and the inhabitants of the island had not been converted to Christianity at the time of the Romans‘ wars of conquest.
Bruckner can have had no more time for such historical inaccuracies than for the contradictory claim that Catholicism is incompatible with national interests; in the apotheosis of Christianity in the hymn at the end of the ballad there seems like doubt that he grasped the underlying message.
The setting of the very last line, “O Herrgott, dich prieset frei Helgoland!” (O Lord God, free Helgoland glorifies thee), in which Bruckner modulates from G minor to the higher G major, is the most spacious in the whole work.
Berliner Philharmoniker
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 1 in C Minor
Allegro- 12:49
Adagio – 13:36
Scherzo – 9:21
Finale, Bewegt, feurig – 14:00
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – “Helgoland”
“Helgoland” – 11:14
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is the first disc of Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s massive (and pretty great) Bruckner Symphony Cycle. I have this disc as a one-off and not the entire box – so, going forward, it will be a mix and great (and not so great) performances of the Bruckner symphonies (and other works). I will just say this, I’m glad Anton B.kept writing after Symphony #1!
Even though he wrote over 200 works in his lifetime, there is only one reason we know the name Max Bruch today – his Violin Concerto in G Mino, Opus 26 – and for good reason, it is an f-ing masterpiece and this recording is glorious. And I’ll take an extra sentence for Edouard Lalo and his Symphonie Espagnole… my God, iconic, brilliant, love it – another reason we know him today as well.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES
No liner notes for this recording (it’s a CBS Masterworks recording from the vault and digitally remastered in the early 1990s) but here are some pics – and be sure to watch the performance videos further below.
Max BruchMax BruchEdouard LaloPnchas ZukermanPinchas ZukermanZubin Mehta
TRACK LISTING:
Max Bruch (1838-1920) – Violin Concerto in G Minor, Opus 26
I. Vorspiel – Allegro moderato / II. Adagio – 17:28
III. Finale – Allegro energico – 7:04
Édouard Lalo (1823-1892) – Symphonie Espagnole
I. Allegro non troppo – 7:47
II. Scherzando – 4:17
III. Allegro molto – 6:13
IV. Andante – 6:46
V. Rondo – Allegro – 7:01
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is just a great recording from the CBS Masterworks vault. Pinchas Zukerman has never sounded better and the LA Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta makes this a classic disc that I love revisiting every couple of years.
Recorded Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, February 1998
* World Premiere Recordings
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
To read the recording notes you would think this recording of Benjamin Britten early works was nothing more than ‘shite’ from a composer that was, eventually, going to be great – but these are really interesting pieces that deserve to be heard more.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Colin Matthews
Benjamin Britten – The Young Apollo
These recordings document an extraordinary period of innovation and experiment from Britten’s early years; two of the works predate his Opus 1, the Sinfonietta, and were never performed in his lifetime, and one, Young Apollo, was withdrawn shortly after its first performance.
Britten was remarkably prolific as a young composer, and many of the works from this time were put aside to await revision or completion as he rushed on to the next piece.
From 1928, when he was fourteen, Britten studied privately with Frank Bridge (1879-1941), before going to the Royal College of Music in the autumn of 1930.
He began writing the Two Portraits in August 1930 shortly after leaving school. One of his closest school friends had been David Layton, who is depicted in the first Portrait(Britten’smanuscript title is ‘Sketch for strings‘).
The second Portraithas the subtitle ‘E.B.B,’Britten’s initials, and it is clearly a self-portrait, with the viola (his own instrument) taking the lead role.
A third movement was planned but was not written; probably there was not time before Britten started his academic studies.
The first Portraitis a highly-chromatic and intense piece, rhapsodic in character, but introducing a strange waltz-like lilt shortly before the remarkable coda, in which solo strings bring back the opening of the work over a distance C major chord.
The second Portraitis strikingly different; a gentile and deeply-felt melody over a simple accompaniment.
During his first year at the Royal College, Britten wrote mainly vocal music, although he completed a D major String Quartet which he was to revise and publish in 1974.
From the autumn in 1931, he began to concentrate on instrumental and orchestral works (including two large-scale ballet scores), beginning work on the Double Concertoin May of 1932.
He interrupted it to compose the Sinfonietta(in no more than three weeks!), but completed the Concertoin sketch by the early autumn. Although the sketch is very detailed, he never made a full score, and seems to have made no attempt to get the work performed.
He showed it to his teacher at the College, John Ireland(1879-1962), who, as Britten recorded in his diary, was ‘pretty pleased’ with it. But it seems quite likely that his experience in rehearsing the newly completed Sinfoniettawith a student orchestra in the autumn of 1932 (‘I have never heard such an appalling row!’ read another diary entry) discouraged him from going on to complete the Double Concerto in score.
He was not, in fact, to hear any of his orchestral music until the first performance of Our Hunting Fathersfour years later.
The Double Concerto was first performed at the 1987 Aldeburgh Festival, with Kent Nagano conducting.
Since the composition of the Concertoand the Sinfoniettawas so intertwined, it is not perhaps surprising that they follow the same formal plan; a vigorous opening movement, and a Tarantella Finale.
The Concerto, although substantially the larger of the two pieces, is perhaps less adventurous in style (the first movement of the Sinfoniettais strongly influenced by Schoenberg’s 1906 Chamber Symphony). Clearly the highly virtuoso writing of the soloists parts led Britten towards more conservative orchestral textures.
However, the dance-like Finaleand sudden and unexpected return at the end to the music of the first movement are as original as anything he had written to date, and the work stands as an outstanding achievement for an eighteen-year-old.
The Sinfonietta’smore concentrated writing for its original ten players reveals a determined effort by Brittento write an ‘Opus 1,’which would make a mark on the musical world.
Although its first performance in 1933 received a mixed reception (for many years the critical establishment tried to dismiss Britten as ‘too clever by half’), his position as the leading British composer of his generation was established from that point on.
In 1936, he made what he called an ‘orchestral’ version with a part for second horn, and indications for string orchestra rather than solo players. But although it received a performance at the time, the only score in which Britten wrote this version was left in the USA after his return home in 1942, and did not reappear until the 1980s.
The annotated score is a particularly fascinating document as on the flyleaf are two poems of W.H,. Auden, written out for Britten in January 1937 by the poet just before his departure for the Spanish Civil War.
Auden’s departure for America in 1939 was the catalyst for Britten’s own move there in April of that year. His initial reception as composer and pianist in the USA and Canada was so enthusiastic that he contemplated a long stay, if not permanent residence.
By the summer he already had his first commission from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation in Toronto, for a ‘Fanfare’for piano and orchestra. Britten wrote in a letter that it is founded on the end of [Keats’ unfinished poem] Hyperion”From all his limbs celestial’... It is very bright and brilliant music – rather inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before.’
Young Apollo was broadcast live by CBC in August 1939 with Britten as soloist; after a subsequent broadcast from New York in December, Britten withdrew the work, and it received no further performance until 1979. Yet he had given it an Opus number (16) and had seemed pleased with it.
Experimental in a wholly different way from his early music, Young Apollo is an extraordinary Fantasiacomposed entirely – with the exception of the piano’s scales in the cadenza near the beginning – in A major.
Britten seems almost to have anticipated minimalism with this work: did he think he had, for once, gone too far?
TRACK LISTING:
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) – Young Apollo, Opus 16 (1939)
Moderato – Allegro Molto – 7:06
Benjamin Britten – Double Concerto in B Minor (1932)
Allegro ma non troppo – 6:03
Rhapsody, Poco lento – 7:25
Allegro scherzando – Allegro non troppo – 8:03
Benjamin Britten – Two Portraits (1930)
No. 1 – ‘David Layton’ for string orchestra – Poco presto – 9:10
No. 2 – ‘E.B.B.’ for solo viola and string orchestra – Poco lento – 5:43
Benjamin Britten – Sinfonietta, Opus 1 (1932)
Poco presto ed. agitato – 4:16
Variations, andante lento – 6:16
Tarantella, Presto vivace – 4:04
FINAL THOUGHT:
Even today, Benjamin Britten is still being discovered and though it took 60 years (!) for a couple of these works to get a recording, it was worth the wait (Note, this was recorded in 1998.). This is a nice group of early Britten pieces and worth a listen. Here’s hoping BB gets the same kind of renaissance that Shostakovich received in the late 1990s which continues to this day! (Note, for good reason – he’s fucking awesome!)
BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra – Conducted by Norman Del Mar (Two Poems For Orchestra, Gloriana)
BBC Symphony Orchestra – Conducted by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (Passacaglia, Sinfonia Da Requiem, Cantus)
Recorded at various English venues from 1977-1981.
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I know the star of this disc is Benjamin Britten, but I have to say I think the star here is Frank Bridge’s Tone Poem #1 – a real charmer – (I can hear you all screaming “But ‘Passacaglia!’) – maybe my head needed something really pleasant to listen to – and it did not disappoint.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – John Mayhew – 1995.
This record celebrates the music of Britten and his mentor and teacher Frank Bridge, and ends with a tribute to his memory.
Frank Bridge studied composition under Stanford and became an accomplished viola player and conductor; when Britten was 14, Bridge gave him private lessons in composition and became a valued friend.
Bridge’s Two Poems (after Richard Jefferies) are among his lesser-known works. The first is scored for a standard orchestra of double woodwind, four horns, timpani, harp and strings and is prefaced by these words from ‘The Open Air’: ‘Those thoughts and feelings which are not sharply defined, but have a haze of distance and beauty about them, are always the dearest.’
The second poem is for a larger orchestra which includes trumpets, tuba and percussion; at the head of the score are these words from ‘The Story of my Heart’: ‘How beautiful a delight to make the world joyous! The song should never be silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever.’
Glorianawas written for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and first staged at Covent Garden on 8th June 1953. Set in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I, the opera is a skillful mix of Tudor idioms and rhythms and Britten’s own unmistakable style.
Some time after its first performance, Britten arranged an orchestral suite from the opera. First comes The Tournament, then Late Song whose optional tenor voice is usually taken by the oboe; the Courtly Dances are often heard independently, and the final movement is Gloriana moritura.
Peter Grimes was the first English opera to gain international footing and met with phenomenal success at its first performance at Sadler’s Wells in June 1945.
The Passacagliais played between scenes in the second act; the theme depicts Grimes’ fall from grace and is repeated by bass instruments against variations played by the solo viola, which represents the apprentice – innocent, silent and fearful.
Sinfonia da Requiem was written ‘in a terrible hurry’ in 1940 while Britten was still in America. He wrote that it was ‘just as anti-war as possible’ and dedicated it to the memory of his parents; friends and loved ones living under threat in wartime England must have been in his mind as well.
First comes a slow marching lament with three motifs. Britten described the central movement as ‘a form of Dance of Death;’ it has a contrasting central section. The final Requiem Aeternum suggests a waves on a remote seashore and recalls a theme from the Lacrymosamovement.
The music of Arvo Part has only recently become widely know outside his native Estonia. Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten is scored for string orchestra and a single bell, and is based on a descending minor scale played simultaneously at three different speeds at the start. This was its first UK performance.
Part greatly regretted not having met Britten, for whose music, he had a deep regard and respect. He wrote that ‘I had just discovered Britten for myself and begun to appreciate the purity of his music.’
Norman Del Mar
The English conductor, teacher and writer Norman del Mar specialized in late romantic and English repertoire. He was frequently seen at the BBC Promenade Concerts and was Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 1960-65.
He conducted all the major British orchestras and was well-known throughout Europe, especially in Scandinavia. His writing includes a study of Richard Strauss and various books on conducting and the orchestra. He was awarded the CBE in 1975 and died in 1994.
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow in 1931, the son of two famous musicians. In 1951, following studies at the Moscow Conservatoire, he worked at the Bolshoi, where he conducted operas by Britten and Prokofiev; he was principal conductor of the Bolshoi from 1964 to 1970. His London debut was with the visiting Bolshoi Ballet in “The Sleeping Beauty” at Covent Garden in 1956. He was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1978 before leaving for Vienna in 1981.
The late Romantic and contemporary repertoire is of great interest to him, and he conducted a wide range of English music while he was with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Having made over 500 commercial recordings, he continues to conduct worldwide, to promote contemporary music and to teach, compose and to play piano duets with his wife Viktoria Postnikova. (Post-notes note: He died in 2018.)
TRACK LISTING:
Frank Bridge – Two Poems For Orchestra
No. 1: Andante moderato e semplice – 7:45
No. 2: Allegro con brio – 4:14
Benjamin Britten – Gloriana
The Tournament – 3:53
The Lute Song – 4:24
The Country Dances – 9:20
Gloriana Moritura – 6:47
Benjamin Britten – Passacaglia from ‘Peter Grimes’ – Opus 33b
Passacaglia – (8:00)
Benjamin Britten – Sinfonia Da Requiem, Opus 20
Lacrymosa – 8:03
Dies irae – 4:52
Requiem aeternam – 5:05
Arvo Part – Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Cantus – 9:33
FINAL THOUGHT:
Discs like this one, curated “hits” attempting to pull together a theme (a tribute to Britten) are always kind of hard to write about. These are great recordings by really strong orchestras and legendary conductors. No complaints here – but also not much to say.
Julliard String Quartet (Robert Mann & Joel Smirnoff, Violins; Samuel Rhodes, Viola; Joel Krosnick, Cello) & Walter Trampler, Viola
Recording Location: Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, NY, May 15-17, 1995.
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
These rarely-played chamber gems get the “Julliard” treatment to gorgeous effect but… actually, well-played doesn’t mean… exciting.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Bruce Adophe, 1996):
Fifty years ago, in 1946, the Julliard String Quartet was formed by the 26-year-old Robert Mann, fresh out of the Army. Fifty years before that, in 1896, the 63-year-old Johannes Brahms, despondent over the recent death of Clara Schumann, composed Four Serious Songs (Op. 121)and Eleven Chorale Preludes (Op. 122).
Brahms, who died at 64, lived almost into the twentieth century. Although typecast as a forever-bearded Romantic god trapped in a remote pantheon called “The Three B’s,” the real Johannes Brahms was only a grandfather away from the generation that founded the original Julliard String Quartet.
Brahms is known to have said, “If we cannot write as beautifully as Mozart and Haydn, let us at least write as purely.” The comment discloses Brahms’ neoclassical bent and surely would have been taken as an anti-Wagner, anti-Liszt sentiment.
Liszt’s music was so utterly disliked by Brahms and Joseph Joachim (the great violinists who was the composer’s lifelong champion and sometime friend) that they used the word “lisztisch” to mean “damnable” in their letters.
In his String Quintet in F Major, Op. 88, composed in 1882, Brahms achieves a purity of form, voice-leading and counterpoint, which heralds a master composer in his maturity. The quintet opens with luminous nobility.
This quite soon gives way to a radiant, more intimate theme (related by the viola) clothed in a new key and a stunning new texture which no one but Brahms ever dreamed of: each instrument has its own special light – cello and second violin play pizzicato, but the cello divides the measure in two while the second violin plucks in six; the first violin plays eight notes to the bar while the first viola plays the tune in syncopated sixes; the remaining viola plays a counter-melody in four.
This kind of innovative rhythmic and textural design is a blueprint for much music of our century, suggesting even the polyrhythmic configurations of Elliott Carter (whose quartets the Julliard String Quartet has recorded). But the intricate musical web vanishes – before its complexity can register in the mind – into a simpler heartbeat patter, full of yearning.
The musical purity Brahms reverered is now clearly manifested as he explores these textures throughout the movement with mastery and deep feeling.
The dark, strring Grave ed oppassionato has enough solid mass to warrant an entire movement, yet Brahms employs it as a standard by which to discover the specific gravity of an Allegretto vivaco and a Presto.
These startling juxtapositions – and their subtle harmonic interrelatedness – seem to have been inspired by Beethoven, who, especially in his late string quartets, discovered uncharted areas of human expression through the investigation of extreme contrast. The underlying metaphor is that of our ultimate aloneness (Grave) in the midst of the busy world (Allegretto vivace and Presto).
The Beethoven connection can also be heard in the finale, which opens with two abrupt, stabbing chords in the manner of Beethoven’s string quartets Op. 59, No. 2, and the third movement of Op. 131.
Following the Beethovenian path still further, Brahms unfolds an uplifting fugue, announcing each entrance with those knifelike chords. Beethoven would not have rolled over but rather sat up straight (both images are problematic!) upon hearing Brahms’ tribute.
While the integration of fugue into sonata form conjures up Beethoven, fugal writing itself summons the spirit of Bach. When Brahms died, Joachim told the Neuen Freien Presse, “On the topmost peak stands Bach, the all-powerful, the incomparable, the creator, the great beginning. Mozart follows as the originator of new forms of beauty, and then comes – Brahms.”
The interviewer asked, “And Beethoven?”Joachim then firmly placed Brahms ahead of Beethoven.
In 1996 – as the new millennium approaches – we can understand the anxiety and exhilaration, the astounded concurrence of old and new, which accompanied the turn of the last century.
Claude Debussy, the prophet and pilot of musical modernism, was twenty-eight years old when, in 1890, Brahms composed the Quintet in G Major, Op. 111. It was the year that the Manhattan Building, the first entirely steel-frame building in the world, was erected in Chicago. At sixteen stories, it was (briefly) the world’s tallest building, earning the nickname “Hercules.”
Feeling the shifting winds, Brahms included a message with the manuscript of the quintet when he sent it to his publisher, Fritz Simrock: “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music – because it is certainly time to leave off…”
But the flowing Herculean architecture of Brahms’ Op. 111 Quintetwill surely outlast Chicago’s steel-framed edifices. In fact, far from giving the impression that its composer might soon retire, the opening of the G-Major Quintetexplodes into existence with a skyscraper of a first theme in the cello, set against a tempest in the remaining four instruments.
Brahms considered rewriting this opening passage to decrease the risk of the solo cello being drowned out. A draft exists in which the upper strings alternate their activity with rests, cutting the massive texture in half. The composer quickly returned to the original conception of the work, deciding that the rewrite sounded flimsy.
Brahms did not always want cellists to be heard, however. In a now famous story, Brahms was playing his own F-Major Cello Sonata with an unsatisfactory partner. The composer let loose at the piano with an enormous fortissimo, causing the cellist to shout over the music, “Maestro, I can’t hear myself at all,” to which Brahms countered, “Lucky for you!”
Brahms loved a full sound and was renowned for his rich, massive tone on the piano. The Julliard Quartet’s Robert Mann remembers a story once told by a musician whose father, many years earlier, had taken him to hear Brahms play his F-Minor Piano Quintet. The boy’s father leaned over just before the music started and whispered to his son, “Listen well to the strings in the opening unison passage because that will be the last time you can hear them at all!”
A friend of Brahms suggested to the composer that the high spirits in the Op. 111 Quintet may have been partially inspired by a public park in Vienna, known as the Prater. “You guessed it!” answered Brahms. “And the delightful girls there.”
If Brahms meant this last comment seriously, he would probably have been referring to the graceful second theme in the first movement, which beings in the violas and is soon passed to the violins – it is as fetching and enchanting a melody as any ever composed.
Brahms professed that his beautiful themes came to him in “instantaneous flashes,” which “quickly vanished,” sometimes before he could capture them on paper. He believed that “the themes that will endure in my music all appear to me in this way.”
Brahms did not mean that he was unconscious when composing, but that he experienced what he called a “semi-trance condition.” Explaining this concept to Joachim, Brahms stated, “You must realized that Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Bach and Beethoven never wholly lost consciousness when they entered that border state.”
Of his own semi-trances, Brahms explained, “I always have a definite purpose in view before invoking the Muse and entering into such a mood.”Brahms decried music which did not achieve a balance between the spirtual and the intellectual plains.
He criticized, for example, the composer August Bungert, whose work was immensely popular throughout Europe in the 1890s, for composing only with the conscious mind.
Brahms predicted such music would soon “go into oblivion.” (He seems to have been coorect so far, although an unexpected Bungert festival is always a possibility given the current craze for thematic programming.)
There is certainly no shortage of inspired, entrancing melody in this quintet. In the Adagio, Brahms unveils another jewel – a sweet, sorrowful melody which abides sublimely on the first viola before the first violin appropriates it permanently.
The violin reveals three tragic visions of the theme (as opposed to the viola’s one). The viola makes a moving, cadenza-like plea towards the movements close, but the violins retain the poignant theme for a fourth and final utterance.
The Un poco allegrettoushers in another heart-stoppingly beautiful tune, this one quality prevails, giving way now and then to momentary disquiet. Here, and throughout this quintet, we find the Brahms so admired by Schoenberg for his ability to fully explore the complexity of a seemingly simple idea.
The five instruments are intricately engaged in imitative counterpoint that is rich without excess, at once elegant and luxurious.
The first viola seems to get an idea for the finale which the other instruments quickly realize is a good one. The Vivace ma non troppo prestotakes the listener on a thrilling ride through the Hungarian countryside. It may seem brief, but you’ll find it is just the right length if you try dancing to it (which you’ll want to do).
By the way, it turns out that Brahms did not give up composing quite as soon as he had expected. Soon after completing this quintet, he heard the clarinetist Richard Muhlfeld play and suddenly found himself once again teeming with ideas, burning to compose.
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Quintet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 88
Allegro non troppo ma con brio – 11:19
Grave ed appassionato – Allegretto vivace Tempo 1 – Presto – Tempo 1 – 10:53
Allegro energico – Presto – 5:32
Johannes Brahms – Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111
Allegro non troppo, ma con brio – 12:48
Adagio – 6:26
Un poco allegretto – 6:13
Vivace ma non troppo presto – 5:00
FINAL THOUGHT:
Normally, Brahms’ chamber music is a can’t-miss-bing-bang-bong success. But after listening to this disc… all I feel is… meh. The answer is ‘meh.’ Not terrible, it’s fine… but… ‘meh.’
Yeah, um, no – there is nothing to say other than Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax play Brahms.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Bernard Jacobson, 1985):
Opus 38is not merely the first of Brahms’ cello sonatas: it was the first sonata he published for piano with any other instrument. The three surviving violin sonatas came much later and the two for clarinetlater still.
Apart from early essays that the fiercely self-critical composer destroyed, including a duet for cello and piano that he played in public when he was 18, the E minor sonata’s only partial predecessor was the C minor scherzo (or Sonatensatz) he contributed in 1853 to a composite sonata written jointly with Schumann and Albert Dietrich as a tribute to the great violinist Joseph Joachim.
If you think about the character of Brahms’ music throughout his life, and in particular about the qualities of color and texture that make it unmistakably Brahms, it is not surprising that, in 1865, he should have approached the chamber-sonata medium through the cello.
The idea that Brahms was indifferent to instrumental color is a misapprehension. The truth is, surely, that he was relatively uninterested in the more obvious and dazzling instrumental effects.
Consider, for instance, his extraordinary use of the piccolo in the Tragic Overture. This usually obstreperous instrument appears in only 15 of the work’s 429 measures – and then exclusively in mysterious pianissimo.
Rather than brilliance, it was warmth of tone that attracted Brahms. And thus it is the clarinet and the horn that he most favors among the woodwind and brass families, and the cello among the strings. In all four symphonies some of the most memorable string effects are those entrusted to the cellos.
Then there are notable solo passages like those in the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto, not to mention the wonderfully idiomatic handling of the cello in the Double Concerto, where it not only shares the limelight with the traditionally more extrovert violin but often takes the leading role in thematic exposition.
Following this line of thought, we find also that nobody, probably, has ever written a more cello-ish cello sonata than Brahms’ E minor. Through the entire length of the work (written for and dedicated to his friend Dr. Joseph Gansbacher) it is the special dark, introspective quality of the instrument that is stressed.
The very first theme exploits its ability to sing a sonorous melody in the lowest register, and at no point in the three movements does the pitch of the cello writing rise high enough to demand the use of the treble clef.
Tone color aside, the E minor sonata is Brahmsian also in reflecting its composer’s Janus-like relation to music history. Brahms faced equally in two directions: toward the past, and toward the future.
Much of his influence on later music derives from the linear and rhythmic freedom of his style, which was to have an effect at least as far reaching as – and arguably healthier than – that of Wagner’s innovations in the harmonic sphere. But Brahms’ liberation of line and pulse, though new to the 19th century, stems from his enthusiasm for the music of a much more distant past, going back to the time of Palestrina and indeed beyond that to the earliest origins of German song.
With all its freshness of expression, this sonata has a certain almost self-consciously old-fashioned air. In the first movement, it is to be found in the unhurried deployment of traditional sonata-form elements, and, more intangibly, in the kind of legendary, “far away and long ago” feeling to the actual cut of the themes.
The other two movements are more specifically historical in reference, the one recalling the minuet style, the other adopting fugal patterns, and the two together constituting a pair of genre pieces evocative of the baroque sonata or suite.
Yet, even here, the backward look is closely related to a forward influence. It is movements like this quasi-minuet that furnish the clearest link between Mahler’s folkish Knaben Wunderhornvein and its medieval antecedents, and indeed the contrast of idioms between Brahms’ first two movements suggests a peaceable juxtaposition of past with present and future styles much like that of the corresponding movements in Mahler’s Second Symphony.
As Brahms matured, he turned away from formal displays of fugal erudition like those in the E minor sonata’sfinale, the Handel Variations for piano and German Requiem, and instead began to fuse the forms and harmonies of his sonata style more intimately with its contrapuntal elements.
Certainly the finale of the F major cello sonata, written in his Swiss summer retreat at Thun in 1886, wears its learning more lightly than its youthful predecessor. But formidably learned this sonata still is, whether in the polyphonic play and pitting of three groups against duple meter in the finale, or in the subtle rhythmic elisions of the scherzo, or in the piano’s breathtaking pp dolce augmentation of the main theme just before the end of the first movement’s development section.
It is not so much learning, however, as passion that strikes the listener first in this deceptively youthful music. The very beginning of the Allegro vivace immediately proclaims the contrast with the E minor sonata: here all is full-blooded romanticism, felt in the constant tumultuous undermining of the movement’s official 3/4 pulse, and articulated as early as the seventh and eighth measures by the devil-may-care leap to the cello’s topmost register.
If the older Brahms tended more and more to moderation, this sonata is a glorious exception, as the “vivace,” “passionata” and “molto” of its movement-headings already suggest. Perhaps, as in the Double Concerto written the following year, it was the return to his old love of the cello combined with the inspiration provided by the gifted young cellist Robert Hausmann that prompted this resurgence of expressive ardor.
It is evident also in the plangent pizzicatos and subsequent Klangfarben-like coloristic effects of the Adagio affettuoso and in that movement’s remote and Haydenesque setting in the flat supertonic key of F-sharp major.
A tangible link with the Double Concerto, incidentally, is to be found in the transition theme of the sonata’s first movement, which could almost be regarded as the concerto’s slow-movement theme set at a different melodic angle.
But the superb coup just before the movement’s end – this time a purely harmonic device that transmutes the last, literal restatement of the stirring subordinate theme into a tender valediction – is a stroke of genius that is all the sonata’s own.
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 1 In E Minor, Op. 38
Allegro non troppo – 14:43
Allegretto quasi Menuetto – 5:58
Allegro – 6:37
Johannes Brahms – Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 2 In F Major, Op. 99
Allegro vivace – 9:22
Adagio affettuoso – 7:45
Allegro passionato – 7:20
Allegro molto – 4:32:
FINAL THOUGHT:
Imagine you’re a cellist and a pianist and you’re trying to do some Brahms in your spare time and then freakin’ Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax come out and just stick the landing like it’s never been stuck before. That’s this recording!
Recorded at Concordia College – February 16, 17, 18 & 25, 1989
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Jesus F-ing Christ, it’s chamber music by Brahms played by world-class musicians – is there a negative? NO!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Dr. Joseph Braunstein, 1989):
Brahms And The Trio
Reviewing Brahms’ piano trios in the context of his oeuvre it is instructive to compare his relevant output with Beethoven’s. Beethoven began his official compositional activity with the set of three piano trios published as Op. 1.
They were actually not his first, for he had composed two trios in Bonn before. Hidden in Vienna, they surfaced only after his death and were never included in practical editions through almost two centuries.
Beethoven’s first piano trios originated before 1792 and his last, the Trio in B-flat, Op. 97, was composed around 1811-12, though published in 1816. To be sure he wrote a piece for piano, violin and cello probably around 1816 which was published in 1824 as Op. 121a.
This opus number is chronologically misleading. These are variations for a trio ensemble, not a standard trio in several movements. Evidently no circumstances occurred to prompt Beethoven to create a piano trio in his last decade of his life.
The case of Brahms is different. He had destroyed the works written in his youth. We do know whether a piano trio was among them. His first work of this category, the Trio in B Major, Op. 8 is the achievement of an accomplished composer who had three piano sonatas but no chamber music piece to his credit so far.
In contrast to Beethoven, Brahms assigned the piano an extraordinarily communicative role in his chamber music throughout his life. Op. 8was written in 1854 when he was twenty-one, while the Trio in A Minor, Op. 114 was composed in 1891, six years before his death at the age of sixty-four.
TRIO IN B MAJOR, OP. 8
Brahms sketched the Trio in B Major in the summer of 1853 when he journeyed on foot, with a walking staff and knapsack, along the Rhine from Gottingen to Hanover. Completed in 1854 it was published in Leipzig in November 1854. There were two private readings in Dusseldorf, one at the home of Clara Schumann with Brahms at the piano and Joseph Joachim on the violin.
The first public hearing occurred on November 27, 1855 at Dodworth Hall in New York. The performers were William Mason (1829-1908), a pupil of Moscheles and Liszt; Theodore Thomas (1835-1905), later conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and Carl Bergmann (1821-1876) who became conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Trio in B Major is a unique creation in view of the key and the architectural dimensions of its original shape. The choice of the very seldom used key of B Major justifies a brief note. Not counting the short Preludes and Fugues in B Majorof the Well Tempered Clavier, where the key of B Major was a foregone conclusion because of the didactic concept of the work, no large-scale composition, sonata, suite or concerto in B major by Bach, Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach nor Handel exists. (Domenico Scarlatti’sK. 245, 246, 261 and 262 in B Major are not works in several movements.)
There are no sonatas, chamber music or orchestral compositions by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in B Major, Schubert broke the spell in his Piano Sonata in B Major, D 575, composed in 1817, published about 1844, which may have come to Brahms’ attention. The key of B major does not appear in larger works of Mendelssohn and Schumann either. Thus the trio of Brahms was the first important composition in B major without have B major successors of consequence.
This Trioconstitutes a unique case within Brahms’ oeuvre because of its length. Brahms was fond of the Trio, yet in the course of time had second thoughts about it. At a performance in Vienna in 1871, he insisted on a substantial cut in the first movement. Finally, he decided on a thorough revision which received its public try-out in Budapest in December 1889 with Brahms at the piano, the Hungarian violinist Jeno Hubay, and the cellist David Popper.
In composing the B Major Trio, Brahms had taken as a point of departure Schubert’s trios, which are of symphonic proportion. So is Brahms’ piece whose measure total of 1628 exceeds that of all his instrumental works. To give a drastic example the Third Symphony is “only” 839 measures long. Thus the reworking resulted in a considerable shortening.
Numerically the “New Edition” (Neue Ausgabe), as Brahms called the recomposed work, is 458 measures shorter and the contents are considerably different. The Trio was a creation of Brahms’ youth, while the revision represents the result of deliberations of a composer whose position in music history was definitely established.
The Neue Ausgabe is essentially a new composition, the retained Scherzonotwithstanding, and we know that Brahms enjoyed it as such. Thus the retained ops number 8 is misleading and the opus number 111 applied to the String Quintet in G Major of 1891 would be more appropriate chronologically. Between the Trioof 1854 and that of 1891 stands most of Brahms’ entire creative life.
The principal idea of the first movement (Allegro con brio, 4/4, cut time) not only generates the Scherzo idea which, incidentally, reappears in the last movement of the “Horn Trio” but occurs slightly altered in the “March of the Dead”in the German Requiem and in the finale of the First Symphony. Substantial cuts and the omission of the fugal passage were made to the movement to achieve a tightly organized structure.
The quick Scherzo(Allegro molto, B Minor, 3/4), displaying minor-major dichotomy, was generally left intact except for the conclusion. The transparency and the deft coda in particular reveal the distinct Mendelssohn touch.
The Adagio(B Major, 4/4) underwent drastic changes. There was, strangely enough, a two measure quotation from Schubert’s song Am Meer serving as the second theme, the excision of which Brahms deemed necessary and justly so. The Adagioquality was seriously impaired by an Allegroportion of more than 60 measures. This passage removed, the movement closes quietly and gently. The tender lyricism of the Adagiois sharply contrasted with the Finalein B Minor (Allegro, 4/4).
The puzzling abandonment of the basic key B Major is partly made good, however, by the introduction of a new beautiful melody which first enters in D Major and reappears in B Major in the recapitulation. Yet B Minor prevails in the vigorous coda.
TRIO FOR PIANO, VIOLIN, AND HORN IN E-FLAT, OP. 40
Brahms composed this Trio, colloquially referred to as the “Horn Trio,” in May 1868 in Lichvental, a suburb of the well-known spa Baden-Baden. There he occupied a little place with a charming view of the country, its wooded hills and nearby forests which he used to roam. He was still suffering from the death of his mother who had passed away in February of that year.
For the unusual combination of piano, violin and horn Brahms had no model. These were the instruments he played in his boyhood. For this trio, Brahms thought of the so-called natural horn, colloquially referred to as Waldhorn (foresthorn) and actually used this term for the publication of the work.
The instrument was familiar to German audiences from the overtures to Der Freischultzand Oberon, and the Notturnoin Mendelssohn’s music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the hunting scene at the close of the first act of Tannhauserwhere waldhorns sound in abundance. Siegfried’s horncall was then still ten years away.
Chromatic notes which the overtone series lacks could not be produced “naturally” on the waldhorn. The invention of the valve mechanism corrected the deficiency, but Wagner contended in the preface to the score of Tristan und Isoldethat the technical improvement brought about “an undeniable loss of the beauty of its tone.”
That was correct for the 1850s and 1860s and the composer of Tristaneven reckoned with the unavoidable improvement of the valve horn. Brahms would probably not find fault with the instruments and the delivery of his melodies by the players of our time. Thanks to modern technology the valves of horns are now greatly improved over their placement in the crude valved instruments of Brahms’ day.
While Brahms’ first trio was unusual because of its key and large dimension, the second occupies a special position on account of the scoring and the structure of the first movement (Andante, 2/4). This is not the customary sonata movement but a rondo-like five-section piece in which the division in 2/4 and 9/8 (poco piu animato) and the modified first section comprise the coda.
Lyricism is the keynote which is sharply contrasted with the vigorously racing Scherzo, a companion piece to the Scherzo of the B Major Trio. The Scherzotheme which foreshadows the principal ideas of the finale includes the ancient GregorianGloriaintonation.
The slower Trio(Molto meno Allegro) is in the key of A-Flat Minor (seven flats) which, of course, causes intonation difficulties for the violinist. They are not mitigated in the following Adagio mesto in E-Flat Minor (6/8). This is a lament in memory of Brahms’ mother. The sorrowful mood turns passionate before the mild ending.
The Finale (Allegro con brio, 6/8) is a true movement a la chasse. The speedy motion in which the horn like the waldhorn of yore lustily participates is kept up throughout. At the request of the publisher Simrock, Brahms edited version in which the horn part was transposed for violin and cello respectively. He recognized the sales possibility. The Triowas dear to Brahms for happy (Lichtental) and sad memories and he was very grateful to those players who performed their part on the natural horn.
THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE SCHUBERT TRIOS
“Golub, Kaplan and Carr play with great finesse. Their carefully thought out and brilliantly executed interpretations are thoroughly convincing… The artists have gone back to the original manuscript of the Op. 100, restored the pre-publication cut, and recorded both versions of the finale, so that the listener can program the compact disc either way.”
On both side of the Atlantic, the Golub/Kaplain/Carr Trio has been acclaimed as one of the finest piano trios before the public today. Robert C. Marsh of the Chicago Sun-Times hailed their performance as “… bursting with genius. I cannot recall an occasion in which this music was played with such complete conviction.” The Trio has toured throughout the United States and Europe in major centers including New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, London and Paris.
Their electrifying performance in Washington D.C. lead the Washington Post critic to write, “When musicians with international renown as soloists join forces, one awaits, sometimes fruitlessly, a revelatory performance that lives up to the individual talents. Yesterday proved that such a blending is not a pipe dream.”
They have also appeared to great critical acclaim with many major orchestras, performing the well-known and beloved Beethoven Triple Concerto.
David Galub, Mark Kaplan and Colin Carr are celebrated solo artists, with performances throughout the world at leading music festivals including Ravinia, Blossom, Spoleto and Marlboro, and with orchestras of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, London, Berlin and Montreal.
One of his generation’s most notable and acclaimed horn players, David Jolley has brought his remarkable virtuosity to audiences in the United States and Europe as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician, as well as a versatile and highly respected recording artist.
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Trio In B Major, Op. 8 For Violin, Cello and Piano
Movement 1 [Allegro con brio) 13:45
Movement 2 [Scherzo – allegro molto] 6:20
Movement 3 [Adagio] 8:38
Movement 4 [Allegro] 6:04
Johannes Brahms – Horn Trio in E-Flat Major, Op. 40 for Horn, Violin and Piano
Movement 1 [Andante] 9:46
Movement 2 [Scherzo – Allegro] 7:46
Movement 3 [Adagio mesto] 8:27
Movement 4 [Finale – Allegro con brio] 6:02
https://youtu.be/x0-eerJgqZI
https://youtu.be/ORvvsRawgDo
FINAL THOUGHT:
Chamber music writing at its finest. Schubert – I know, I got your Schubert right here – but Goddamned, Brahms is the freakin’ man. That horn trio? Come on, seriously?!
I mean, if they could have only gotten a couple of decent soloists this would have been a home run.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Barry Millington, 1988):
Brahms: Concerto for Violin and Violoncello in A minor, Op. 102
“I must tell you that I have had the strange notion of writing a concerto for violin and cello!” wrote Brahms to the conductor Franz Wullner in August 1887. A few days later, in a letter to Clara Schumann, the description was amended to “happy notion” – an indication that Brahms had relished the challenge of producing a work in such an unusual, and potentially problematic, medium.
The Double Concerto comes at the end of a line of substantial orchestral works: 4 symphonies, 3 concertos, 2 serenades, 2 overtures and the ‘Haydn’ Variations. It was written in 1887, during the second of the three summers Brahms spent at Hofstettern on Lake Thun in Switzerland, and was performed in Cologne on October 18 the same year.
The composer clearly intended the work as a gesture of reconciliation to his violinist friend Joseph Joachim, from whom he had become estranged over the latter’s divorce, and it was Joachim and his quartet colleague Robert Hausmann that Brahms had in mind when composing the work.
The short opening orchestral statement is reflected upon by the solo cello in a quasi-improvisatory passage, soon followed by another in which the two solo instruments exchange ideas in the non-competitive spirit that is to characterize the work as a whole.
Just as these extended solos recall the opening of the B Flat Piano Concerto, so the gently weaving figurations of the central F Major sections of the Andante look back to the slow movements of both piano concertos. The finale is a fusion of sonata and conventional rondo elements.
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Although not the only work Mendelssohn wrote for the medium (a youthful concerto in D minor has also been occasionally performed), the E minor is invariably referred to as the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
It is, without doubt, his finest concerto for any instrument and its passionate advocate, the late Hans Keller, was prepared to put it alongside the masterpieces of Beethoven and Brahms as “arguably the greatest of them all.”
It was written for the violinist Ferdinand David while Mendelssohn was on a recuperative holiday at Soden near Frankfurt am Main in September 1844 and was first heard the following March at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under the Danish composer Niels Gade.
The greatness of the work lies partly in its formal innovations, but primarily in the compelling potency of its melodic inspirations. Dispensing with the conventional opening orchestral tutti, Mendelssohn launches his solo instrument immediately on a poignant cantilena soaring high above the stave.
The slow movement too is dominated by an intensely lyrical theme both announced and expanded exclusively by the soloist. The first two movements are joined by a transition effected by a sustained bassoon note, scarcely sufficient to quell the applause that might have been expected in the nineteenth century.
A further structural innovation is the placing of the first movement cadenza at the end of the development section rather than later in the movement, following the recapitulation.
The finale, which is introduced by an eloquent little meditation by the soloist, is in the elfin dancing style – and indeed in the key – of Mendelssohn’s Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Concerto for Violin and Violoncello in A Minor, Op. 102
Allegro [16:51]
Andante [7:44]
Vivace non troppo [8:41]
Felix Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
Allegro molto appassionato [12:59]
Andante [8:12]
Allegro non troppo – Allegro non vivace [6:27]
FINAL THOUGHT:
This CD is not f-ing around (excuse my German!). In the late-1980s, Bernard Haitink conducted the finest band in the land and Perlamn and Rostropovich were no slouches either!
Emanuel Ax sort of knows what he’s doing… and he’s also sort of a master of liner notes (see below):
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (By Emanuel Ax):
“I felt certain an individual would suddenly emerge fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner, who would achieve mastery not step by step, but at once, springing like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove. And now here he is, a young man at whose cradle graces and heroes stood watch. His name is Johannes Brahms…”
This was Schumann’s greeting to the twenty-year-old composer who had so impressed both Clara and Robert with his mastery. He had already played movements of his first two piano sonatas for Joseph Joachim, who was equally overwhelmed by the music’s “undreamt-of-originality and power” and by Brahm’s equally mesmerizing playing.
Brahm’s education create the two sides of his nature that make his music unique, personal, and virtually instantly recognizable. His music teacher Edouard Marxsen – an accomplished musician who valued Classical form and logical structure – strongly encouraged Johannes’ interest in composition, as well as accomplishment in virtuoso piano playing.
At the same time, the Romantic movement in literature swept the young man off his feet (he called himself Johannes Kreisler, Junior, after E.T.A. Hoffmann’s mad violinist-hero, and kept a notebook of literary quotations which he named “Young Kreisler’s Treasure”).
This tug between structural balance and Romantic excess delineates one of the cardinal trademarks of Brahm’s music. The other ubiquitous element is rhythmic complexity, especially as exemplified in the hemiola.
Marxsen was instrumental in working with Johannes to strengthen his left-hand independence and sense of cross-rhythm. The contrast of two-against-three and various multiples of this relationship – so integral to Brahm’s dramatic pulse – represents a rhythmic counterpart to the emotional tug of excess and control. The feeling of inevitability in the large structure is always accompanied by a sense of turmoil underneath.
The Sonata No. 3, Opus 5, is unusual for Brahms in two respects: he cast the work in five movements (although one could almost make a case for doing the last three without pause, as part of one large structure); and, at Brahms’ request, a quotation from Sternau was included in the published version at the beginning of the second movement:
Der Abend dammert, das Mondlicht scheint,
Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe Vereint,
Und halten sich selig umfangen.
(Night falls and the moon shines,
Two loving hearts are united,
Embracing each other blissfully.)
This evocative and touching phrase shows the influence of Romantic literature on Brahms – so striking considering his usual distaste for ascribing literary allusions to his music.
The piece must have been virtually finished by the time Brahms was twenty and had met the Schumanns for the first time – the second and third movements of the work, in fact, were premiered as a unit by Clara Schumann in a concert in Leipzig in 1854: the first performance of the whole Sonataoccurred at a musicale in Magdeburg by Hermann Richter.
As usual, Brahms tinkered with the work for a long time, and, also as usual, we have only the final product, along with letters which tell Joachim that he had “substantially altered” the Sonata, and again, that he must “severely review the Sonata, especially the Finale.”
In any case, the final product has become one of the glories of the pianist’s repertoire.
The first movement – Allegro maestoso – isremarkable for its combination of breadth and intensity (in a letter from 1856, Brahms remarked: “NB, It would have been better to mark the first movement Moderato“). The outer limits of the instruments are immediately established in the first five measures; the next episode, with the muted pyramid of hemiolas (cross-rhythms), will act as an animating force throughout the Sonata. There is a remarkable economy of thematic material, as the first theme, the second theme, and, in fact, the transitional material between the two all share the same leap of the fourth.
The second movement, with the Sternau superscription, progresses from the intimate, yearning first theme to the even more hushed and intimate interlude in the sub-dominant which then becomes transformed into a coda of great ecstasy.
Once again, economy of thematic material combines with mastery of form and a prodigious invention to produce the most spontaneous-seeming, sublime effect. The last arpeggio of the movement appears to demand a continuation directly into the passion of the Scherzo, which abruptly breaks the rapturous stillness.
(The Scherzo perhaps testifies to Brahms’ familiarity with the Mendelssohn Piano Trio in C Minor; the theme is a note-for-note quotation of the Trio’slast movement; and Brahms’C-Minor Piano Quartetseems to owe much of its last movement to the same Trio’sfirst.)
The Intermezzo, a true intermission – subtitled “Reminiscence”(Ruckblick), goes back to the love theme of the Andante, but this time in the minor mode; one feels very much a sense of loss and desolation.
Its conclusion speaks of tragedy, and the Finaleemerges from it almost reluctantly – the pauses and fermatas have the function of a recitative-introduction, and it is an absolute masterstroke that Brahms also makes this quasi-improvisatory rumination the actual theme of the Rondo. With each repetition of the material it becomes stronger, until finally the entire series of hesitations resolves in an accelerated coda. The feeling is one of bursting the bonds which have held “the young eagle” (as Schumann called him) in check, and the final flight to freedom.
The Three Intermezzi, Opus 117,also start with a superscription: the words “Schlaf Sanft, mein Kind” (Sleep, sleep, my child) from a Scottish lullaby. The mood of peace and intimacy of the first gives way in the secondand third Intermezzi to ever increasing darkness and despair.
These pieces and, in fact, almost all of the late piano works are more directed toward the individual than toward the audience. Joan Chisell, in her book on Brahms, very plausibly suggests that Brahms’ piano writing in his later years was motivated by the increasing frailty of Clara Schumann, who was so intimately associated with all his creations for the piano. The dimensions, outwardly, have become smaller, but the inner dimensions are greater than ever before – the density of emotion and intellectual stimulation is as great in these works as in anything Brahms or, for that matter, anyone ever penned.
TRACK LISTING:
Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Opus 5
Allegro maestoso [10:36]
Andante [10:44]
Scherzo [4:36]
Intermezzo [3:44]
Finale [7:52]
3 Intermezzi, Opus 117
No. 1 in E-flat Major [4:39]
No. 2 in B-flat Minor [4:32]
No. 3 in C-sharp Minor [6:10]
FINAL THOUGHT:
Just a great recording from one of the great master interpreters of Brahms in history. I couldn’t find a video of him playing it (the link above is over Emanuel Ax playing the 3rd movement in audio only) but here is a great classic performance in by Claudio Arrau from Santiago, Chile in 1984 (though it completely looks like the 1960s).
Recording Location: CBS Recording Studios, New York, NY, 1982
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
There is nothing to review about Glenn Gould’s final piano recordings – just listen and love.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES: (by Peter Eliot Stone)
The nineteenth century ballade took its earliest inspiration from literary sources – the ballads or narrative poems, usually German or English in origin, dealing with legendary, historical or often purely romantic characters and happenings.
Thus, ballades were early characterized by a programmatic content that could easily seize the imagination both of composer and listener alike. Works by some composers, such as Frederic Chopin, were even considered to parallel lines of poems – in Chopin’s case those by fellow-countryman Adam Mickiewicz.
Johannes Brahms, on the other hand, devoted his ballades, as a rule, to “absolute” music, and his Four Ballades, Op. 10 of 1854 contain only one “programmatic” piece – the first in D minor.
This Ballademusically embodies the famous Scottish ballad of patricide, Edward (“Why does your brand sae drop wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward?”), which Brahms knew in translation from Johann Gottfried Herder’s Stimmen der Volker and which he later set for alto and tenor (Op. 75, No. 1). Brahms climaxes this grim dialogue between mother and son with the Beethovenian fate motif that was to color many of his other works. When the opening theme returns, Brahms treats it in a surprisingly operatic fashion.
The second Ballade, in D major, departs from its lyrical mood with a dramatically contrasting middle section.
The elfin third Ballade, in B minor, labelled intermezzo and functioning in the set as a scherzo, likewise differentiates its middle section. Brahm’s interest in the inner voices of the fourth Ballade, in B major, reveals the influence of his friend Robert Schumann, but Brahm’s more classic reserve and his formal sophistication yield glimpses of the master’s mature style.
Brahms dedicated his Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879), to the charming and musical Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, originally entitling them “Capriccio (presto agitato)”and “Molto passianato.”For Brahms, the word capriccio did not seem to imply a light-hearted caprice (unless he used the titles ironically). Almost all of his caprices were gloomy, turbulent, and in the minor mode.
Regarding publication in 1880, Brahms suggested the title “Rhapsody”to Elisabeth. She answered: “You know I am almost most partial to the non-committal word Klavierstucke, just because it is non-committal: but probably that won’t do, in which case the name Rhapsodien is the best, I expect, although the clearly defined form of both pieces seems somewhat at variance with one’s conception of a rhapsody.”
Somewhat at variance, indeed!
Temperamentally “youthful” but compositionally mature, there is nothing improvisatory or irregular about these pieces. The first, in B minor, contains its agitation within a da capo form to which a coda has been added.
The second, in G minor, unleashes its passion through what for all intents and purposes is a sonata form. Yet the pieces do not resemble movements that might flow from the pen of the neo-classicist Brahms when he intended to write a sonata. Here, Brahms eschews the stable expository section for the instability of development right from the start.
In the first Rhapsody, the middle, bagpipe-like section, is based on a complete exposition of a “second theme” that had been arrived at prematurely and in the “wrong” key in the first section where it was then interrupted by a further intensive development of the first theme.
The G-minor Rhapsodyopens with a true primary-group theme whose iambic rhythm, one of Brahm’s fingerprints, contrasts fittingly with the march-like secondary group theme. But the oppressive nature of this second Rhapsody continues to the bitter end, unlike the brief B-major close of the first Rhapsody which somewhat softens its turbulence.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Brahms Ballade, Op. 10, No.1 (D-Minor)
2: Brahms Ballade, Op. 10, No. 2 (D-Major)
3: Brahms Ballade, Op. 10, No. 3 (B-Minor)
4: Brahms Ballade, Op. 10, No. 4 (B-Major)
5: Brahms Rhapsody, Op. 79, No. 1 (B-Minor)
6: Brahms Rhapsody, Op. 79, No. 2 (G-Minor)
FINAL THOUGHT:
Below is a fascinating (audio) recording of the complete Brahms Ballades recording session from 1982. I didn’t listen to the complete 5 HOUR (!!) recording – but just so much great audio of Gould being Gould (so to speak). Enjoy!
[This recording receives the VERY RARE 88 out of 88 for the simple fact – it’s Glenn Gould’s last piano recording before his death. It may not deserve 88 out of 88 (from a review standpoint) but as a huge Gould fan, anything less would be silly.]
Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter (Conductor)
Recording Location: American Legion Hall, Hollywood, California (Tragic Overture 1960; Symphony No. 4 1959)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
The final recording of the Brahms symphony cycle Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, the 82-year-old genius really brings a weight and importance to Brahms that only an 82-year-old genius can bring.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES: (None)
This is a discount CD from the remastered CBS Masterworks recordings – so, unfortunately, no notes. I would have loved to have read about the recording of the Brahms symphony cycle.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Tragic Overture, Opus 81 [13:18]
Symphony No. 4, Opus 98
2: Allegro non troppo [12:55]
3: Andante moderato [11:46]
4: Allegro giocoso; Poco meno presto [6:26]
5: Allegro energico e passionaato; Piu Allegro [11:16]
FINAL THOUGHT:
These great old recordings aren’t heard that much anymore. So happy I have them in my collection. This project is allowing me to go back and listen to CDs that I may not have ever heard again.
The above links at the top of the page are of the actual recordings reviewed here (no video). Below is just a really great live performance of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 – Bernard Haitink conducting. Enjoy!
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company
