BRAHMS: Piano Concerto Nos. 1 & 2; Incidental Piano Music – Igor Levit, piano/ Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/ Christian Thielemann, piano and conductor – Sony 1965897652 (3 CDs = 2:54) (5/31/24) *****:
The etiology of this Brahms collection extends from late February to mid-April 2024 and fulfills a long-delayed collaboration between pianist and conductor. I can state, initially, the reading of the 1858 D Minor Concerto (April 12-15, 2024) proves a highly personal, alternately epic and intimate, realization of the Brahms dark concerto masterpiece.
Conductor Thielemann (b. 1960), newly appointed to the Berlin State Opera directorship, consistently emphasizes the influence of Beethoven’s late influence – especially 0f the Ninth Symphony – on the Brahms style and structure. The symphonic proportions of the D Minor Concerto proper and the deliberate imitation of Beethoven’s C Minor Concerto’s rondo finale, with the obbligato fugato section, receive a potent gravitas and broad color spectrum. Thielemann, like Karajan and Furtwaengler before him, bears within him the sense of the Great German Tradition, parting an immanence and palpable aura of the transcendent in his interpretations. Pianist Levit (b. 1987), often digs deep into the keyboard, avoiding the tendency to sing only on the top line without allotting the Brahms interior and bass lines their full due. Along with the broad tempos of the Maestoso first movement – ever more ubiquitous since the Glenn Gould/Leonard Bernstein version has become “standardized” – both affectively dramatic and lyrical.
The Brahms B-flat Concerto (rec. 8-10 December 2023) immediately enjoys a singular, resonant antiphon between French horn and piano solo, before Thielemann launches into the singing mysteries of the Allegro non troppo tutti, robust and muscular, but graceful as well. The forward momentum reigns throughout the first movement’s various periods of development, sensitively wrought in terms of piano and orchestral colors. The delicacy of Levit’s tonal palette more than once reminded this auditor of the brilliant hues that Walter Gieseking and Wilhelm Backhaus could invoke in Brahms, vigorously pungent without abrasive banging. The sense of classical structure evolves seamlessly, moving from Levit’s high register filigree into the horn and winds’ restatement of the opening theme with pizzicato string accompaniment. The energetic fury increases as the musicians move to the last pages, the main theme’s gathering its last statement in wind colors when the keyboard, in percussive gestures, finds the timpani in sympathy for a moment, and all forces suavely make their way to a resonant, pedal-pointed coda.
For a moment, the old sturm und drang in Brahms asserts itself in the D minor Allegro appassionato second movement. What Brahms ironically called a “whisp of a scherzo” thrusts forward with powerful resolve, relenting for its secondary motif, a softly fluttering version of the opening. This music, too, builds in girth and momentum, reaching a fervent (though marcato) expression in the orchestral part, seeming to justify the derisive epithet for the work, “symphony with piano obbligato.” In truth, some auditors may find the approach here somewhat inflated, but no less musical.
If an oboe solo steals the lyric impulse in the slow movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto, the same indictment could be levelled at the Andante of this Second Piano Concerto, in which solo cello Tamás Varga grabs the berries. This extended meditation offers fine moments to Levit as well, who relishes the intimate occasion to muse in various triplet figures and selected syncopations, the music’s flirting with the darker tonality of F minor, and then moving by degrees into Più Adagio and F-sharp major. The intimacy extends quietly, ppp in the strings, until the cello reminds us of the wonder of the Brahms capacity for heartfelt song in the major key. Levit’s capacity for legato and parlando phrasing and soft, extended trills proves amply mesmerizing. Optimistic, buoyant energy radiates throughout the last movement, Allegretto grazioso, with charmed harmonies from the VPO flute, oboe, bassoon, and clarinet in fine tandem with the exuberant strings. The move to a darker B minor intrudes some degree of latent passion, but the serene evolution of the music resumes the momentum, soon to enter a more animated mode, più presto. The sighing motif holds sway, now playful with the piano’s cooperation. Touches of passing D minor and G minor do not dissuade this music’s fertile charm, realized in a kind of sturdy dance to the final, voluptuous coda.
Disc 3 proves the most ambitious of these Brahms studies, given the compressed intimacy of the sets of solo pieces from the composer, 1892-1893. These 20 works, concentrated as they are, reveal many degrees of affect, from the tempestuous and declamatory, to the intensely personal, almost abjectly nostalgic, melancholy. Brahms favored the Streicher piano, an instrument he secured from the manufacturer in 1872. He coveted “conservative” pianos that could deliver distinctive voices and timbres in the treble, middle and bass registers, whose hues would vary with a shift in volume. Brahms asks that the performer’s thumbs execute the melody notes and as endings to thick arpeggios that “blanket” the main theme. The construction of the Streicher, too, its parallel stringing and leather-covered hammers produced for him a warm sound, and he requests ben legato as a designation to produce his ideal, smooth sound.
The Op. 116 Fantasien begin with two polar affects, the blazing Capriccio in D Minor and its emotional foil, the Intermezzo in A Minor. The schizoid emotional juxtapositions continue as Intermezzi and Capriccios alternate, their haunted melancholy demanding the intimate salon occupied by the composer’s own “Davids-League” of faithful converts. The first E Major Intermezzo, an Adagio, seems to dissolve even as the music proceeds. The effect of tolling bells intrudes and hints at private grief. A more eerie affect emerges in the E Minor, No. 5, a staggered sequence of notes that manages to stretch the melody forward in sighing gestures. The angular melody of the second E Major, marked Andantino teneramente, plays as a personal dirge, a cautious lament. The final Capriccio, that in D minor, Allegro agitato, may owe debts to the French clavecinists whom Brahms admired, although the throes of emotion remain well within the Romantic ethos.
Like the set Op. 116, Op. 117 Drei Intermezzi has a collective title. “Three lullabies to my sorrows” stood as the composer’s concept for these pieces, the first of which, in E-flat major, incorporates a German version of the Scottish ballad Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament. The more liquid Intermezzo in B-flat Minor seems to echo hints from Schubert. Levit’s crystalline rendition for No. 1 now moves to “rainy-day” sentiments in parlando phrases. The third, in C# minor, projects a darkly haunted, angular lied not far from Kurt Weill and WW II sensibility. Some posit Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Victor Galbraith” as a possible inspiration. The optimistic, central moment in A major too soon passes back to its emotionally desolate opening statement, Andante con moto.
Walter Niemann wrote of the Brahms 1893 set of Six Piano Pieces that “the virtuoso with Brahms must be silent.” The interval of the minor second informs many of the pieces, and each casts a degree of searching, pained nostalgia. The most famously lyrical selection, the No. 2 in A major, unfolds in ABA form as a poignant lied. Levit articulates each melodic note with a care easily reminiscent of the late Ivan Moravec. The compressed, aggressive G minor Rhapsody enjoys a somber swagger, a refined reminiscence of a Beethoven bagatelle. Levit takes the F minor Intermezzo quickly, an étude in contrasting colors in canon, broken sequences and potent octaves. The F major Romanze pays homage to Robert Schumann and his penchant for dual trio sections. The delicate, traveling trill offers its own color content. A mere three-note pattern sets the stage for the miniature epic Op. 118/6 in E-flat minor, an Andante whose defiant pose embraces bass tones that ring with post-Wagner influence. At this point we do well to recall the set is dedicated to the composer’s most ardent object of desire, Clara Schumann.
The composer’s summer home at the spa town of Bad Ischl set the stage for his Four Piano Pieces Op. 119. No. 1 in B minor may be the most far-reaching in influence: its chains of falling thirds and broken melodic arc point to many compressed works in the Second Viennese School. Brahms spoke of the piece as “exceptionally melancholic. . .every note must sound like a ritard, as if one would suck melancholy. . .from every one of the said dissonances.” Levin’s two hands chase each other for No. 2 on E minor, embracing the contrast between a jaunty, “tenderly” agitated opening and a reflective middle section. The third of the group, Intermezzo in C major, served Artur Rubinstein as a perpetual encore. In a bouncy 6/8, the piece moves “graceful and happy,” but momentarily exploding into passion, lacking any contrasting section, slowing down to regain composure. The final work, Rhapsody in E-flat major, Allegro risoluto, conforms to sonata form even as it asserts a Beethoven propensity for a “fate motif.” The originally five-bar phrases transition, grazioso, that settles for eight-bar phrases, subdivided 3+2+3, only to move, a bit daintily from Levit, to a coda in an unusual gambit, E-flat minor. “Old bachelor music” Brahms declared, but Clara Schumann, in receipt of Op. 118 and Op. 119, averred, “It is really marvelous how things pour from him; it is wonderful how he combines passion and tenderness on the smallest of spaces.” Find some space for this collection.
—Gary Lemco
Levit and Thielemann Play Brahms:
Levit:
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15;
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83;
7 Fantasias, Op. 116; 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117;
6 Piano Pieces, Op. 118;
4 Piano Pieces, Op. 119;
Thielemann
Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 39/15
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