Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Started by BachQ, April 07, 2007, 03:23:22 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.


BachQ


Boston Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, 31, makes his debut with the BSO this weekend.



Conducting himself with aplomb
By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff  |  March 7, 2008




With this weekend's program, Boston Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor Julian Kuerti is making his BSO debut. As he's just 31, the orchestra has come up with a special pay-your-age promotion. (Not recommended for Elliott Carter.)

The Toronto native is the child of musicians: Father Anton Kuerti is a pianist, mother Kristine Bogyo is a cellist and the founder of Toronto's Mooredale Concerts. Kuerti studied engineering physics before dedicating himself to conducting. I recently e-mailed him to learn more.

Q: Did your parents encourage your interest in music? Did they have reservations?

A: My parents were both themselves musicians, and I grew up in a household where there was constantly chamber music, lessons, practicing; in fact, I remember the first time it dawned on me that everyone in the entire world weren't musicians. So as you see music was something very normal for me, as was practicing (my instrument was the violin). However, almost paradoxically, both my parents encouraged me to pursue a career other than music. They both knew how tough the profession can be, how many disappointments and how much work must go into it, so they told me, "You should only consider being a professional musician if you know that this is the only thing you can and want to do for the rest of your life." It was about that time that I stopped practicing the violin.

Q: What is engineering physics? Did you ever get your degree?

A: Engineering physics is part of a program offered at the University of Toronto within the department of engineering science. . . . It was a very theoretical engineering course - rumored to be the most difficult undergraduate course offered at U of T - and I specialized in quantum optics. Basically, it was the application of quantum theory toward light and optics. My fourth-year thesis was titled "Lasing and Amplified Spontaneous Emission in Periodic and Quasi-Periodic Photonic Band Gap Materials." I did graduate, with honors, but I was never passionate enough about science to make it my life's work.

Q: Why did you become a conductor?

A: Well for one thing, I love it! As I finished the engineering school, it became clear to me that I was to be a musician - that was the only thing I really cared about and the only thing that I wanted to do. As a conductor, you need to be a focused introvert, studying and re-studying a score into every last detail; then you need to stand in front of the orchestra and convince and lead them in the vision that you have constructed; and in performance you must be absolutely extroverted and transparent to the music and to the creation that you are charged with bringing to life. For me, it's the most fulfilling profession.

Q: How do you deal with the very natural fear that could come from being so young and stepping in front of the BSO?

A: As long as I'm prepared and know the music, I'm never afraid to step in front of an orchestra. However, just before walking onstage, there is a bit of the same feeling you get waiting in line to go on a roller-coaster. I've been listening to the BSO all season - during rehearsal and in concert, so I feel very excited to make music with them.

Q: Tell us a bit about the program.

A: The first piece, "The Way to Castle Yonder" by Oliver Knussen, is a suite created from his opera "Higglety Pigglety Pop!" which is an opera for children. It has some very striking and beautiful music, and a wonderful spirited romp toward the end. I had the chance to study this work with the composer and conduct it for him in Budapest, and it's a great work from a composer I feel strongly about.

Dvorak's Seventh Symphony in D Minor is perhaps his most formidable work in the symphonic genre. This is not the Dvorak of folk tunes and playful dances - instead, the work is reaching out to an intellectual German aesthetic (and is very much inspired by the Third Symphony of Brahms - which the BSO will play later in the season under James Levine). The first movement is full of turmoil and passion, which does sweeten into an unbelievably beautiful second theme before the undercurrents and unrest take over again. The climax of the first movement is almost a frenzy, but quickly the mood fades into the somber tones that we heard at the beginning. The second movement is - along with the slow movement of the Sixth Symphony - one of my all-time favorites by this composer. The scherzo is quite playful with a lilting middle section. The last movement is a powerhouse, propelling us forward through the doom and gloom of D minor to the majestic ending that really crowns the work.

After intermission, Leon Fleischer will join me for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Emperor." This is one of the most powerful and moving piano concerti, performed by an absolute legend. I feel very humbled to play this with him - since he played it with some of the most outstanding conductors of the 20th century - and I look forward to learning everything I can from such a master.

Q: What is something about yourself that would surprise people?

A: I once went on tour to Brazil playing the electric violin in a rock band.

Q: Do you listen to other kinds of music? Pop music? Who?

A: There was a time when I listened to a lot more; when I was playing the drums [in high school] I loved Led Zeppelin and tried to play like their drummer did. Nowadays I find that I listen to less and less pop music - maybe because since I spend so much time thinking about music and listening to it in concert halls and recordings, when I have "time off" I really enjoy silence. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I could never have music on in the background - it always demands my attention.

Q: Is it at all discouraging to look out in the audience and see that older people far outnumber people of your generation?

A: Not at all. I love seeing people out there who enjoy music - period. I feel that in time, the people of my generation will slowly start to discover the world of the concert hall and opera house, and that they will be naturally attracted to it. There is something very spiritually moving about listening to an orchestra play, but you have to be at the right time in your life in order to want it and to appreciate it. In Berlin, I am music director of an ensemble called kaleidoskop (you can check us out at kaleidoskopmusik.de). There we have the opposite problem - our audiences are all between 20 and 35. This is a horrible thing for us in a way, because these people can't afford to support our organization financially. We are trying very hard to attract older audiences! But generally, the older people are quite turned off by our advertising.

Q: Do you and Jamie Sommerville watch Maple Leaf games together?

A: We watched the Super Bowl together. I would love to watch the Leafs - better yet, I would love to go to the [td Banknorth Garden] and see them play the Bruins.

Bonehelm

Damn, can't get the coda of the 1st out of my head. It's heart-pounding everytime I hear it; what a glorious race to the end...not to mention the quasi-Brucknerian brass chorale that emerges so dramtically in the middle of that string ascension...

paulb

Which is your favorite recording  by Oistrakh of the vc?
I am listening to this 1953, i love the mastery of Kondrashin's  classical approach , which captures the image of that old world from long ago, you feel drawn back into a  time of long ago And Kondrashin allows Oistrakh's  a  background to  work his magic on the violin. What  a  team that was. The sound quality suffers abit, but that adds to the overall affects of creating a feeling image of being a part of the 19th century work of art. * a world of long ago*



Saul

I think that the Brahms Violin concerto in D minor is stuning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfq1-0feaCQ

Brian

Quote from: Dm on February 25, 2008, 12:00:50 PM

Brahms Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3, Pittsburgh S. Orch., Marek Janowski






"it's a sign of the special qualities of Marek Janowski's Brahms that he's at his best in the [Third] symphony. ... This is great Brahms conducting--and playing--with the Pittsburgh Symphony audibly rising to the occasion." -- DH


Forgive me for being about a month late on this one, but that is a spectacular recording and everyone interested in a digital or surround-sound Brahms 2 or 3 ought to acquire it. Great performances in great sound.

BachQ

Quote from: Saul on March 23, 2008, 10:54:35 AM
I think that the Brahms Violin concerto in D minor is stuning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfq1-0feaCQ

Saul, you're being very cruel to me: Brahms's Violin Concerto is not in D Minor, it's in D Major ( :'().

One can only venture a guess as to what wondrous vistas would emerge with a D Minor violin concerto ......

BachQ

A Give and Take Between Experienced and Emerging



Itzhak Perlman, far left, performing the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor (Op. 34) with, from left, Sharon Roffman on second violin, Orion Weiss on piano, Yves Dharamraj on cello and Jessica Oudin on viola as part of the Perlman Music Program series.




New York Times
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: March 24, 2008
Since 1993 Itzhak Perlman and his wife, Toby, have coached a parade of superb young chamber players in what began as a summer music school and now runs through the year. The public face of the Perlman Music Program is a series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the installment on Saturday evening Mr. Perlman played first violin in Mendelssohn's String Quintet in B flat (Op. 87) and Brahms's Piano Quintet in F minor (Op. 34). Between those works, the LK String Quartet, a group formed at Mr. Perlman's summer school in 2002, gave a rugged account of Bartok's Quartet No. 3.

The most immediately striking element of the Mendelssohn performance was not the music making, polished as it was, but the ensemble's body language. Even taking into account that gestures are easily (and too often) falsified, especially among young musicians, these players attentively watched for cues from Mr. Perlman and one another and seemed genuinely engaged in the give and take. The performance illuminated the richness of Mendelssohn's melodic imagination and had the fluidity and zest you expect from musicians who react to one another rather than merely play their lines.

The LK String Quartet's light-textured, transparent reading of the Bartok was unusual, but it wasn't as if these players turned the music into Lehar. Passages that demanded a harsh edge received it, and in its best moments the performance was fiery and propulsive, with striking unanimity in the quickly shifting dynamics of the final pages.

The Brahms performance shared many of the attributes of the Mendelssohn, with Orion Weiss's appealing account of the piano line, the sweet-toned tandem violin playing of Mr. Perlman and Sharon Roffman and the richly textured sounds of Jessica Oudin's viola and Yves Dharamraj's cello all contributing amply to the sense of Brahmsian warmth.

The other performers were Michelle Ross, violinist; Megan Griffin, violist; and Jia Kim, cellist, in the Mendelssohn, and Sean Lee and Kristin Lee, violinists; Laura Seay, violist; and Jordan Han, cellist, in the Bartok.



BachQ

#270



chicagotribune.com
CLASSICAL REVIEW
Kissin, CSO create sparks with Brahms
By John von Rhein

Tribune critic

March 22, 2008






Classical music needs its glittering bodies as badly as any other branch of the performing arts, even if it has fewer such gods to send onstage than it once did. Thank goodness, then, for the likes of Evgeny Kissin, the Russian firebrand-poet who, along with the comparably gifted Lang Lang, seems to be upholding the piano celebrity cult almost single-handedly these days.

Kissin, almost as boyish-looking as when he made his Chicago debut nearly 18 years ago, returned to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, bringing with him one of the supreme knuckle-busters in the Romantic repertory, Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1. True to expectation, the pianist conquered, and the sold-out house was all but delirious with pleasure.

Kissin, at 36, appears to have toned down many of the interpretive mannerisms from the Russian Romantic school that once marred his readings of non-Russian repertory. His Brahms was in fact a thrilling experience: massive and sinewy, yet full of burnished warmth and played with immense technical authority.

There was something almost superhuman in the nonchalant command with which he tore through the torrential volleys of chords and furious passage work of the outer movements. With conductor Charles Dutoit as sympathetic intermediary, the dialogue between the piano and various solo instruments felt spontaneous. And the majestic cantilena of the Adagio never dragged.

As if climbing one of the piano's Mt. Everests actually refreshed him, a smiling Kissin hugged Dutoit, applauded the orchestra and rewarded the standing, cheering throng with two encores: Chopin's Scherzo in B-flat Minor (sensationally played) and Brahms' Waltz in A-flat (complete with a memory slip neatly finessed).

Dutoit, launching a two-week guest engagement, began with a gleaming performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Russian Easter Overture" that showed off the CSO's corporate strengths very well, not least a darkly intoned trombone chorale.

Stravinsky's Symphony in C is the master's Chicago symphony, written for the CSO's 50th anniversary and premiered by the orchestra in 1940, with Stravinsky conducting.

Those shifting meters, eccentric rhythms and offbeat running figures can be the very devil to get right, but Dutoit had everything in proper balance. The orchestra responded elegantly, its woodwinds as poised and lucid as dancers in one of George Balanchine's Stravinsky ballets.





Erratic tempos mar Kissin's rendering of Brahms
KEN WINTERS

From Friday's Globe and Mail

March 28, 2008 at 4:12 AM EDT

TORONTO SYMPHONY

ORCHESTRA

EVGENY KISSIN, PIANO

Sir Andrew Davis, conductor

Colin Fox, narrator

At Roy Thomson Hall

in Toronto on Wednesday

Brilliant Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and its conductor laureate, Andrew Davis, for a performance Wednesday of Brahms's First Piano Concerto that combined extraordinary lyrical sensitivity and exquisite pianistic detail with an erratic approach to pulse and rhythm that left us wondering whether he thought of the music as a whole organism of sound or only a chain of lovely notions that he could tighten or slacken at will.

There was no doubt about the finesse of Kissin's playing. He trained this great problematic lion of a concerto into a biddable pussycat, with purring trills, lithe octaves and handfuls of chords effortlessly sprung. He folded his music into the soft bosom of Sir Andrew's elegant orchestral rendition as if it had all been conceived by Mozart or Chopin. But not, perhaps, by Brahms.

The first clue to the soft concept of this performance was the long orchestral introduction to the first movement. Instead of the hair-raising gigantic, craggy thrust we expect, what we got was strangely small-scale and subdued, very nicely played under Davis but not bursting with energy.

Then, with Kissin's entry in the piano's gentler music, everything slowed down, not just reasonably, but excessively. This launched us into an account of the movement that hurried in the fortes and the fortissimos and slowed frequently and inordinately for the soft bits, all underlying pulse forgotten.

The Adagio, when it came, was all lingering sensitivities, each phrase nearly stopping while we admired Kissin's delicate milking of its minutiae. Again, the playing was phenomenally refined and explicit, every note projected with the ease of a master.

The finale was more robust - that is its nature - but so was the playing, though even here the questionable principle fast-when-loud, slow-when-soft was insisted upon. The orchestra under Davis achieved miracles of constant adjustment to Kissin's tempos and dynamics.

It was obvious, though, in Davis's effusive embrace of Kissin during the applause, that the two were completely in cahoots over the waywardness of their concept of the work. I could not agree with the concept, but I admired the skills with which they both realized it and the orchestra concurred.

The evening opened with Raymond Luedeke's Tales of the Netsilik, the orchestral work with spoken stories of the Inuit tribe known as "people of the seal," who lived above the Arctic Circle.

Luedeke, a clarinetist in the TSO, composed the work in 1989, and the orchestra premiered it successfully with the popular broadcaster Peter Gzowski as the storyteller. Gzowski, speaking modestly and simply, was touching and compelling in the role. A few years later, the piece was revived by the orchestra with the superb Martha Henry as the storyteller, and Henry brought a whole other dimension to the tales.

Wednesday's storyteller was noted Canadian actor Colin Fox, who read with dignity and clarity but was unable to touch the heart as Gzowski had done, or compel the imagination as Henry had done. This had the effect of suggesting that Luedeke's work itself had lost its lustre, like one of those novels that seem momentous when they're published but don't last out their decade. On Wednesday the score seemed noisy, sententious and harmonically thin. Luedeke himself introduced it from the stage clearly and with a good deal of charm. His introduction was the best thing about it.

Special to The Globe and Mail





M forever

Quote from: Dm on March 25, 2008, 06:21:36 AM
Kissin, almost as boyish-looking as when he made his Chicago debut nearly 18 years ago, returned to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, bringing with him one of the supreme knuckle-busters in the Romantic repertory, Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1. True to expectation, the pianist conquered, and the sold-out house was all but delirious with pleasure.

Kissin will play the 2nd concerto next week here in Boston, accompanied by the BSO and Levine. They will also play the 3rd symphony. I don't know yet if I will have time to go, the concerts are sold out anyway, but maybe there will be returned tickets or something like that. I will try to get a ticket if I find the time to. Levine's recording of the 3rd symphony with the WP is extremely good, and his performance of the 2nd serenade with the BSO recently was also very nice, so that might be a fun program to see.


Quote from: Dm on March 19, 2008, 11:30:56 AM
Brahms, Symphony No. 2, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carlo Maria Giulini






"Serious music taken seriously--that's the first impression you might glean from this magnificent performance. ... Throughout, the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays spectacularly, with a warmth and precision certainly not matched by the Vienna Philharmonic in Giulini's later, less interesting remake for this same label. This earlier version also enjoys cleaner, more natural sonics."  -- DH


This is indeed an outstanding recording, even though clueless Hurwitz praises it - but you can't hold that against Giulini and the LAPO.  ;D They also made a very good recording of the 1st symphony. Actually, everything they recorded with him in that period is very good, there is also Tchaikovsky 6, Schumann 3, Beethoven 3, 5, and 6 - the Eroica is particularly impressive. Interested listeners should not be put off because Hurwitz recommends it, and also not because of this little attack of American cultural inferiority complex (which he has all the time anyway). The playing and music making is really very good. The LAPO back then really had a special sound, warmer and heavier than most American orchestras, but still fairly compact and sharply outlined - I heard them a number of time live in the 80s and early 90s - but unfortunately, that special sound and ensemble quality is now gone. Salonen downgraded the orchestra's sound and overall quality siginificantly. They won't get any better under Dudamel because he never learned how to build up and cultivate an orchestral style over a long period either. Sad. But this disc is a nice reminder of what this orchestra could do back then.

BachQ

Pollini - Brahms Piano Concerto No.1

http://www.youtube.com/v/gJskAs5MmPE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/v/79H6aqdpb90&feature=related


Quote from: M forever on April 05, 2008, 02:32:33 PM
Kissin will play the 2nd concerto next week here in Boston, accompanied by the BSO and Levine. They will also play the 3rd symphony. I don't know yet if I will have time to go, the concerts are sold out anyway, but maybe there will be returned tickets or something like that. I will try to get a ticket if I find the time to.

GO!


Bonehelm

Just finished playing HvK/BPO's '78 recording of the 1st...the chorale in the finale's coda is MIND BLOWING! And I thought Solti was the man there...

Renfield

Quote from: Perfect FIFTH on April 07, 2008, 08:55:08 PM
Just finished playing HvK/BPO's '78 recording of the 1st...the chorale in the finale's coda is MIND BLOWING! And I thought Solti was the man there...

Indeed, that is probably the best Karajan iteration of said chorale. :)

Bonehelm

Quote from: Renfield on April 07, 2008, 09:27:44 PM
Indeed, that is probably the best Karajan iteration of said chorale. :)

It's nice to have a fellow Karajan-believer on the forum! I think there are  more of them than just us, though  :)