I am hardly posting anything these days, but this is such a beautiful post with such beautiful music. I respect Rick Beato more than anyone else in pop music these days because he is such an unbiased and sensitive listener. He has earned the huge following he has. This post only went up sixteen hours ago and already has 1,600 comments,
If anyone is interested, I might put up a post on what I'm reading right now in a few days. It includes the Bhagavad Gita and Oscar Wilde!
Two years ago I had the pleasure of hearing three great pianists at the Festival: Grigory Sokolov, Evgeny Kissin and Igor Levit, all Russians, though Levit grew up in Germany. This year I am hearing another two great Russians, Arcadi Volodos and Daniil Trifonov. I suspect that these five Russians pretty much exhaust the first rank of pianists in the world these days.
Volodos' program last night focussed on late works by Brahms and Schubert. Let me take a moment to compare this to the last piano recital I attended. The performer and the program in that instance were designed to appeal to, I guess, the typical listener. The program was a grab bag of diversity and had an admixture of styles from Baroque to ragtime. The performance was fast, glittery, insensitive and sloppy. For me it left an unpleasant aftertaste. The Volodos repertoire and performance was the diametric opposite: two composers and only late works by both, instead of a superficial "variety," a profound aesthetic range and, at the end of the evening, a deep satisfaction.
The program, played without intermission, consisted of the Six Piano Pieces op. 118 by Brahms, composed at Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut (i.e. not far from Salzburg) in 1893, followed by the late Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 by Schubert, composed in September 1828, in Vienna, the third month before his death in November of that year.
Arcadi Volodos is a native of St. Petersburg, born in 1972, and studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory.
This is the first time I have heard Volodos and he does not disappoint. I have read raves of his ability and they were substantiated. He is a magician at the keyboard, with astounding command of the finest shades of dynamic and color. He often creates mystic atmospheres of texture with finely delineated pianissimi and is a master of the pregnant pause. He rarely resorts to fortissimo and it is more effective for that very reason. He played five encores and, at the risk of provoking the commentators who know the piano repertoire better than I, I will admit that I was unfamiliar with all of them. I am only able to identify guitar recital encores with any accuracy as that is where I spent most of my performing years!
The Haus für Mozart, next to the Grosses Festspielhaus, was 90% full, a testament to the Festival's efforts to make this year a return to normalcy.
Here is Volodos acknowledging the applause at the end of the concert.
And here is the Ballade, op 118 no 3 from a recording by Volodos.
Last week we looked at the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky which was composed in 1878 (which I neglected to mention) and is in the key of D major. This week I am going to take up the Violin Concerto of Brahms which was also composed in 1878 (big year for violin concertos!) and is also in D major. The great Violin Concerto by Beethoven is another in D major. Why is D major such a popular key for violin concertos? The answer has to do with the tuning: the strings of the violin are tuned G D A E:
which means that you have easily available not only the tonic, D, but also the subdominant, G, and dominant, A. As a bonus, the E string is the dominant of the dominant. This is of great advantage in writing virtuoso figuration and polyphony. Great advantage to the player, that is! While you can play in any key on violin, some keys offer more possibilities with less effort. Guitar concertos tend to be written in keys like D, A and E major for the same reasons.
Brahms' model for this piece was the Beethoven Violin Concerto and it vies with it for length and seriousness. Brahms did not find an opening as brilliantly original as Beethoven's (which I talked about here), but he followed the Beethoven model (and the 18th century model in general) in giving the orchestra a substantial opening in which a number of themes appear before the entrance of the soloist. But he departs from the 18th century model as far as harmony goes. Schubert was one of the first to widen the scope of harmony so that both the major and minor modes were virtually interchangeable and this is Brahms' practice here. The opening for the orchestra simply outlines tonic harmony in D major (with the rich resonance of violas and cellos doubled by bassoons):
A nice eight-measure phrase ending with a half-cadence on V. This is followed by a phrase in C major and then this theme in the violins:
This is a strong statement in D minor, but is followed by a continuation returning to D major. This is telling the listener that the key of D is going to include both the major and minor versions. Before the solo violin enters there is another theme that even more strongly presents D minor by means of its viiº7:
Bear in mind the key signature is two sharps. Then, at measure 90, we finally have the solo violin with this cadenza-like phrase:
Click to enlarge
The violin continues with a lot of (very lovely) figuration that simply repeats the kinds of harmonies we have already heard in the orchestra (a lot of D minor) before finally presenting a theme which turns out to be that opening we first heard in low register, now given in a very high register:
This is followed by more varied figuration and then the solo violin takes up a theme that we heard in the orchestra just before the solo entry. This provides an energetic, rhythmic contrast and makes use of that open E first string to add a pedal over the harmonies. The key is A minor:
(Mind you, in the last measure he is tonicizing the dominant E.) The next important theme we hear is given to the solo violin and seems like a new one. This is a device used by Mozart: as the problem in concertos is that you have two expositions, one for the orchestra and one for the soloist, how do you make this interesting? What Mozart often did was give some entirely new theme(s) to the soloist.
This is the most distinct theme we have heard so far, the only one we are likely to go away humming and he has been saving it until now, measure 206! Though this theme is new, it also sounds awfully familiar (the mark of a great theme) and the reason is that Brahms has been preparing for it since the beginning. It is solidly in D major and has been set up in subtle ways. The outlining of the triads, plus the hemiola (turning two measures of 3/4 into one measure of 3/2), plus the arpeggio eighth-notes have all been heard before. This is a trick that Sibelius was very fond of. Each of his symphonies tends to have One Big Theme that he prepares you for from the beginning. For example the big theme of the last movement of the Symphony No. 5 we hear in a nascent form at the end of the first movement.
The development is shared pretty equally between the orchestra and the soloist, though she gets to introduce one new theme that is a variation on previous material:
The recapitulation starts at measure 381 and is as you would expect. Brahms did not write a cadenza for this concerto. Most soloists seem to play the one by Joachim, who consulted with Brahms on the violin writing and gave the premiere. He opened the concert with the Beethoven Violin Concerto!!
I won't say anything about the other movements as I think this is enough analysis for today. Let's listen to my favorite violinist Hilary Hahn, with Paavo Järvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra:
I'm sorry for the out-of-sequence post, but I misremembered when this concerto was written, thinking it was later than it was. Last week I talked about the Piano Concerto of Edvard Grieg, which was composed in 1868. I should instead have talked about the Piano Concerto No. 1 of Johannes Brahms, which was composed in 1858. But never mind, I will just backtrack a bit.
Brahms comes in the second generation of 19th century composers, after the first generation, born around 1810, that Charles Rosen called "the Romantic Generation" in an excellent book on the period. That first generation, made up of Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann, were all revolutionaries in one sense or another: both Chopin and Liszt revolutionized the techniques and expressivity of the piano, Berlioz cut loose from the central European traditions, Mendelssohn absorbed and cushioned the influence of Beethoven and Schumann unleashed the irrational side of Romanticism. Some of the consequences of these revolutionary changes were a loosening and diffusing of instrumental form. Large instrumental works became fluid and suggestive instead of taut and insistent as they were with the last of the Classical masters, Beethoven and Schubert.
It was left to Brahms to revive and reestablish the large Classical forms like the symphony and concerto which had both been transformed in their structure. The symphony had been largely supplanted by the rather more wandering "tone poem" of the New German School and the concerto had become more virtuosic and less substantial in its structure. Brahms set out to rectify both these forms and the first work in which he saw public success in this endeavor was his Piano Concerto No. 1. He was a young man of only twenty-five when it was premiered in Hannover in 1859.
This is a large, substantial work in which the orchestra is an equal partner in the musical development, not a mere colorful accompaniment as in some other Romantic concertos. Brahms' model was fairly clearly Beethoven rather than Mozart and this concerto is even longer, at around 50 minutes, than Beethoven's last piano concerto, at around 40 minutes. An indicator of the way Brahms thought of the work is the fact that during one stage of its lengthy genesis, he conceived it as a four-movement symphony. In its final form, however, it became a three-movement concerto in the standard Classical layout: a large, maestoso first movement, an adagio in ternary form and a final rondo.
I won't try and and pull out all the themes of the piece for you. It begins with a rather stormy orchestral introduction:
Which does NOT lead immediately to virtuoso flourishes on the piano as in so many of the other Romantic concertos. Brahms restores the balance between the soloist and orchestra, which here gets a lengthy introduction before the soloist enters with this rather subdued theme:
The piano does get to start the last movement, the rondo, with real brio:
And now I think we should have a listen. This is Hélène Grimaud, piano, with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Gielen:
I was just over at Greg Sandow's blog reading about his music criticism course and leaving a comment. One of his reading assignments was this essay by George Bernard Shaw in his role as one of the great music critics. He makes fun of a new (at the time) book on music theory by H. H. Stratham called Form and Design in Music. Shaw doesn't like it for a couple of reasons. One is that Stratham chooses a melody by Wagner as an example of bad melodic writing and Shaw, of course, is a famous Wagnerian. The other is that Stratham engages in what Shaw calls the "Mesopotamian manner", that is, he talks about music using technical vocabulary such as "the dominant of D minor". Shaw delivers a brilliant satire of this by subjecting Hamlet's soliloquy to the same technique. A sample: "Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive..." Brilliant, funny and almost telling. But it is really a straw man, isn't it? It is usually quite unnecessary to discuss Shakespeare in this manner because he is writing in what we almost recognize as our own tongue (though more and more remote from us with every decade) and there is hardly a need to point out that "To be or not to be" is in the infinitive, because we know it by virtue of speaking English. But the dominant of D minor is not necessarily obvious until it is pointed out, and it has a very definite function and role that may be worth mentioning.
Unlike Shaw, we are living in a time when fewer and fewer books on music contain what I would recognize as talk about music. If I buy a book on Shostakovich symphonies and concertos, I hope very much that it will inform me about them. I hope to find the important themes in musical notation, discussion of the harmonic structure and so on. But that is no longer the case. A book on Shostakovich symphonies and concertos contains no musical examples whatsoever, but merely the author's attempt to communicate, in metaphor, his impressions of those themes. You can talk all you like about passionate reveries and juggernaut marches, but at the end of the day it is just vague metaphor and I know very little more than I did before. Instead of ten pages of rambling metaphor, I would much prefer a line or two of musical examples.
Shaw delivers some scathing criticism of Brahms in this review and while I think he is actually too kind, I think the argument would have benefited from a couple of specific examples. Having strong opinions is all very well, but it is even nicer to mention why. The internet provides us with some amazing resources. Not only can we put up thoughts in writing, but we can also put up musical notation and even performances to demonstrate our points:
Sometimes, we can do both simultaneously! I leave you to find on your own the other seven (7!!!) clips that make up the rest of the piece.
