Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

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

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BachQ



BachQ



From the Los Angeles Times
MUSIC REVIEW
Los Angeles Philharmonic plays Brahms, Wagner
The L.A. Phil, under Salonen's baton, blurs the divide between Brahms and Wagner.
By Mark Swed
Times Music Critic

May 3, 2008

In their day, Brahms and Wagner divided audiences into angrily opposing camps. Sober conservatives went to the concert hall thankful to Brahms for upholding tradition in his beefy symphonies and concertos and chamber music. Meanwhile, besotted Wagnerians agitated for a music of the future, which could be found in opera houses able to meet the unprecedented musical and scenic demands of their German idol.


Thursday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen once again pitted classicist against sensualist at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The first half of his Los Angeles Philharmonic program was devoted to Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, 50 minutes long and written in 1881. After intermission came 40 minutes' worth of excerpts from Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," the last of his "Ring" operas, which was completed in 1874. The match was a fair fight. And a great concert.


In many ways, the Brahms/Wagner divide was less about the composers than about their followers. Sixty years ago, Schoenberg never tired of telling his students in Los Angeles that Brahms was a closet progressive whose thick, chromatic harmonies subverted tonality. And for all Wagner's musical advances, no composer ever became more quickly canonized.


The L.A. Philharmonic, in fact, first played music from "Götterdämmerung" in 1921, two years after the orchestra was founded and six years before it got around to Brahms' Second Piano Concerto. These days, Wagner's "Ring" is such standard fare that stage directors try harder and harder to keep it fresh. Sunday, a new production of "Siegfried" opened in Vienna in which Brünnhilde was awakened by the titular hero not on her fire-protected rock but in a public restroom.




Although the interpretations of both composers were slightly outside the norm, the Disney Hall on Thursday felt free of dogma. Leif Ove Andsnes, the popular Norwegian pianist, was the soloist in the Brahms, and neither he nor Salonen cares much about the soft side of the composer.


That meant that for the "Aimez-vous Brahms?" crowd, the crisp-toned piano and no-nonsense orchestra might have felt a little like ice water used to extinguish whatever smoldering flames of romance they find in this, the more lyrical of Brahms' two piano concertos. Still, I thought the performance might also have provided a perfect soundtrack for Françoise Sagan's 1959 existentialist novel about a disillusioned middle-aged woman and her young lover.


Often the ground beneath one's feet was not solid in this performance. Brahms has a habit in his concerto of creating the impression that the piano is swaying nicely while the orchestra is just adding something pleasantly murky underneath. In reality, there are fault lines in this score.


Andsnes has brilliant technical command. He was true to the notes on the page, incisive in his rhythms and outstanding in his ability to balance rich Brahmsian textures with revelatory clarity. On the surface, he played with songful grace, but he and Salonen also delved deep below, pointing up rhythmic intricacies and taking striking note of dissonances.


Wagner is less obscure. He creates spectacles of sound in his orchestra, and "Götterdämmerung" sounded spectacular. Salonen chose the standard orchestral excerpts -- "Dawn and Rhine Journey" and "Siegfried's Funeral March" -- and ended with Brünnhilde's "Immolation." Soprano Lisa Gasteen was the soloist.


The orchestra was large. Four harps were placed at the lip of the stage in front of the first violins. The horn contingent looked massive, and there was one player in the balcony for an offstage effect.


As "The Tristan Project" proved a couple of years ago, Wagner in this hall is something special. Again Salonen emphasized clarity, the true sounds of instruments rather than mushy magic. His is a Wagner without the voodoo. And yet to hear penetrating brass, singing strings, the refracted color of the wood- winds and the quartet of harps calling a listener to heaven is to be in a kind of sonic heaven.


Again, an "Aimez-vous Wagner?" contingent could miss some warmth. Gasteen was a stern and angry Brünnhilde, not an ecstatic one. But the Australian soprano commands attention. She has a dark, rich tone that can rise above the orchestra when it needs to. She went to her funeral pyre a stoic, not a mystic, which I found moving.


Also moving, and often thrilling, were the Philharmonic horns, which had a big night, even if they started off slightly shaky in the Wagner. Both pieces were built from horn calls, and Eric Overholt and William Lane were the protagonists in Brahms and Wagner, respectively. Peter Stumpf provided the lyricism necessary for the cello solo in Brahms' slow movement.

M forever

Quote from: Dm on May 03, 2008, 04:46:29 PM
The L.A. Phil, under Salonen's baton, blurs the divide between Brahms and Wagner.

The LA Phil blurs a lot of things under his baton. Most of what I heard from them during the past years while I lived in SoCal was mediocre at best. The playing of the orchestra under him is often surprisingly insecure and awkward, and there are usually lots of booboos plus the string playing has really degenerated massively under Salonen's "leadership". They used to sound great, better than the string sections of most other more or less major American orchestras, now they just sound scrappy and thin. I am glad I am in a place now where I can hear much better music making all the time. This article just reminded me of that, thanks! Like last week, I heard both the NY Phil with Dutoit and the Orchestre National de France with Masur, both concerts were outstanding.

BachQ

Quote from: Bunny on May 07, 2008, 09:33:12 AM
Brahms - it's his birthday, after all. ;D

Quote from: ChamberNut on May 07, 2008, 09:37:50 AM
Which means it's also Tchaikovsky's birthday also. 

Happy birthday Brahms & Tchaik!

Haffner


BachQ

This post is dedicated to Mark Antony Owen ...... Ah, hell, this entire page is dedicated to Mark Antony Owen .........



May 11, 2008
CLASSICAL RECORDINGS
Songs of Tragedy, Triumph and Hope
BRAHMS: 'EIN DEUTSCHES REQUIEM'

Twyla Robinson, soprano; Mariusz Kwiecien, baritone; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Robert Spano. Telarc 80701; CD.

ONE of the great gifts that come with the music directorship of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, an amateur group founded by Robert Shaw in 1970 and lovingly shaped by him over almost two decades. And Robert Spano, in his choice of repertory, has lustily availed himself in his seven years on the job.  But what also comes with the territory in respect to recordings is that, as likely as not, Shaw got there first. In this case Mr. Spano's strongest competition includes a Shaw recording with the orchestra and chorus from 1983, also on Telarc.

Mr. Spano shows a firm grasp of the work's structure, which is remarkable in its symmetry, the seven movements rising to burly climaxes in the second and sixth and subsiding to a peaceable equilibrium in the choralelike fourth. The orchestra plays well, and the chorus is its usual sonorous self.  But the text came across a little better in the Shaw recording. The fault here may lie in the recording rather than the singing, for certain orchestral details, like the timpani triplets in the second movement, are also less clearly etched.

In addition the vocal soloists sound a bit strained in their separate ways. Mariusz Kwiecien sings with a broad, sturdy tone but with a vibrato that sometimes grows wobbly. Twyla Robinson produces a thinner sound, again with a vibrato that can prove trying. Shaw's soloists, Richard Stilwell and Arleen Augér, are more winning, and his performance generally sounds more incisive, if only because of the way it was recorded. Still, for listeners not wedded to it, or to any of a number of other worthy versions, Mr. Spano's account merits serious consideration.

JAMES R. OESTREICH

BachQ

San Francisco Gate

Music review: Brahms PC #1 & Serenade #2
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Friday, May 16, 2008



For a fully rounded musical portrait of the young Brahms, you could do worse than to pair his First Piano Concerto with the Serenade No. 2 in A. That's what Michael Tilson Thomas did in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night, in the second installment of the San Francisco Symphony's three-week Brahms Festival, and the contrasts could hardly have been more marked. The two pieces were published and premiered nearly back-to-back in 1858-59, although the roots of the concerto go back several years to Brahms' abortive stab at writing a First Symphony. But taken together they offer a nicely compact glimpse of the 26-year-old composer's artistic concerns.

The First Concerto, published as Op. 15, finds him in a thunderously oratorical mode, with Beethoven's example very much on the brain. The music is craggy, explosive stuff, full of ominous trills, asymmetrical rhythms and dark harmonies.

But with Op. 16, Brahms turns around and puts on his party-entertainer hat. The serenade, inspired in a wonderfully anxiety-free way by the lighter confections of Mozart and Schubert, has no more urgent goal than to please. The melodies are light and ingratiating, the harmonies uncluttered, and even the dark instrumental palette - Brahms had the ingenious idea of scoring the piece for an orchestra without violins - hardly casts a shadow on the prevailing pleasantness.

The differences between the two pieces would have been pronounced in any case, but Thomas made the point all the more explicit in his interpretive emphases. The concerto, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist, wasn't merely robust, it was titanic; the performance of the serenade courted suavity and fluidity almost to the point of evanescence.

Both performances made their case, up to a point. Bronfman rose to the concerto's technical challenges without perceptible struggle, and his largely muscular rendition was punctuated by sudden bursts of light-footed grace. Thomas led the orchestra through all five movements of the serenade with unforced charm.

Yet it was hard to avoid the feeling that each piece might have stood more convincingly on its own, rather than existing in tonal opposition to the other. The desire to set oneself apart from others is a constant theme in Brahms' life and career - he was determined to show that he was not Beethoven, not Schumann, not Wagner - and to hear it extended to the works themselves seemed oddly constraining.

The evening's least psychically charged episode came at the beginning, with a performance of the "Haydn" Variations that began rather flaccidly but gained power by the end. Thomas took the occasion to salute three longtime Symphony members who are retiring from the orchestra: violinist Daniel Kobialka, violist Leonid Gesin and trombonist Mark Lawrence. All three have made important contributions to the orchestra and to the musical life of the Bay Area; they will be missed.

BachQ

New York Times
May 16, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
A Brahms Piano Quartet, With No Strings Attached
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER



Musicians and composers have long been tempted to transcribe and rearrange each other's works, like chefs experimenting with a recipe. Sometimes new ingredients are a welcome addition; on other occasions you yearn for the original flavors.

That was the case when the Sylvan Winds performed an arrangement of Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor at Weill Recital Hall on Wednesday, with the pianist Claude Frank. The flutist Samuel Baron arranged the work, originally for piano and three strings, for piano and wind quintet. The transcription is idiomatic and particularly effective in the Rondo alla Zingarese, the fiery final movement. In the slower sections I missed the emotive warmth and passion of Brahmsian strings.

But the main problem was the painfully sloppy playing of Mr. Frank, a distinguished pianist who sounded here as if he were sight-reading, prompting a near-derailment and a mushy overall effect particularly unfortunate in the vivacious Rondo. A more polished piano sound would certainly have better complemented the fine playing of the wind players: the flutist Svjetlana Kabalin (the only original member of the group), the clarinetist Pavel Vinnitsky, the bassoonist Erik Holtje and the horn player Zohar Schondorf. The lilting, pure tone of the oboist Alexandra Knoll was particularly admirable throughout the evening.

The concert opened with an appealing performance of Samuel Barber's languidly lyrical "Summer Music" for wind quintet, written in 1956 and part of his small chamber music output. Barber didn't attach a specific program to the work, but the Sylvan musicians aptly conveyed the sultry prairie humidity it evokes and the vitality of its jaunty outbursts.

The program also included Mozart's Quintet for piano and winds in E flat. A few ragged edges notwithstanding, the wind players and Mr. Frank mostly did justice to this work. After its premiere in 1784 (when the composer played the piano part), Mozart wrote to his father that he considered it "the best thing I have written in my life."

Bonehelm

Goddamn, Furtwangler's Brahms 1 is one high-voltage performance. I just got shocked by it.

M forever

It would be fun to hear you try to pronounce the name "Furtwängler". Could you record a clip of that and post it here?

MN Dave


Bonehelm

Quote from: M forever on May 17, 2008, 03:37:50 PM
It would be fun to hear you try to pronounce the name "Furtwängler". Could you record a clip of that and post it here?

I would like to hear you pronounce Huang Xie Shua'er first.

BachQ

Concert review: With D Minor Piano Concerto, Pianist Bronfman Channels Torment of Young Brahms
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
Article Launched: 05/17/2008 01:33:45 AM PDT



Some people will tell you that music, especially orchestral music, is an objective thing: It doesn't exist beyond the notes, which simply are to be played as the composer instructed. Everything else - the emotions, the supposed story line of a given piece - is your own projection onto the music. Well, if you actually believed that while going into Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, you probably would have abandoned the theory by the time you left. Because soloist Yefim Bronfman's soul-stirring account of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor was one in which he stepped into the shoes of the composer, young Brahms, grappling with his impossible love for a woman, and played that role for about 50 monumental minutes, an actor on the stage, with the San Francisco Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, as his consoling Greek chorus.

At least that's how I heard it. Pianist Bronfman, a bear-like presence who can trill like an angel or make the bass register growl, was Brahms, who composed this piece between 1854 (the year he turned 21) and 1858 (when he turned all of 25).

In love with mentor

In those years, Brahms drew close to Robert Schumann, the composer, and his wife Clara Schumann, the pianist and composer, adopting them as mentors and surrogate parents, but also wildly falling for Clara, 15 years his senior, fighting his passions for her (as she did for him), even while grieving for Robert,
who descended through madness and institutionalization to his death.

That's the story line, a strong frame for a forthright narrative performance by Bronfman, who tonight performs again at Davies, where the symphony is in the midst of a three-week Brahms festival.
His performance Thursday transcended, if not buried, its purely technical dimension: the way he dispatched its massive blitzes of octaves and other sequences, his command of the cadenzas, his ability to make you hear the inner voices of chords - and he played, it seemed, thousands.
What emerged beyond that was an emotional journey, in all its complexity: Sometimes he would intentionally muddy the chords, holding down the pedal to create a clash of bleeding sonorities, underscoring the turmoil in Brahms' heart.

Bronfman and Tilson Thomas began coyly enough; the first half of the opening movement, which lasts more than 20 minutes, was almost muted.

Then, all at once, Brahms/Bronfman's temperament switched, with violently percussive volleys across the keyboard and then a rocking back and forth in mood: tearful or dreamy yearning, fiery frustration and a final scream with a pummeled chord in the bass.

The second movement, the Adagio, often described as a portrait of Clara, was part prayer of thanksgiving, with an accruing strength in the piano, and part lonely cry for help - to be loved. Gorgeous clarinets touched down amid exceptionally tender playing by the orchestra: that consoling chorus.
And then the finale, with Brahms/Bronfman striding out onto the world's stage: a young man's declaration of confidence in his abilities to live, if not love.

Aside from being an almost unbelievable achievement by a composer in his early 20s, the concerto, which Brahms first conceived as a symphony, and then as a sonata for two pianos, reflected, in its very process of composition, the transformation happening in Brahms's life.

It remains a huge statement of personality and ego, filled with "enormous Brahmsian gestures," to steal a phrase from Tilson Thomas, who spoke off and on through the program. Bronfman's performance was filled with such gestures, yet the first half of the concert - also memorable - was almost devoid of them. It featured two works by Brahms, the Variations on a Theme by Haydn and the Serenade No. 2 in A major, that are practically ego-less: works that don't get in your face.





M forever

Quote from: Wotan on May 17, 2008, 11:05:03 PM
I would like to hear you pronounce Huang Xie Shua'er first.

I have no idea how that is pronounced.

I only know very little about Chinese culture. But I don't imagine I do either. That's why I don't post nonsense about it on internet forums.

Just like you know very little about German culture. But you imagine you do. That's why you shouldn't post nonsense about it on internet forums.

Bonehelm

Quote from: M forever on May 18, 2008, 02:04:52 PM
I have no idea how that is pronounced.

I only know very little about Chinese culture. But I don't imagine I do either. That's why I don't post nonsense about it on internet forums.

Just like you know very little about German culture. But you imagine you do. That's why you shouldn't post nonsense about it on internet forums.

That's amusing.

I need to know about German culture to listen to German music? And when did I post any nonsense about German culture? I make posts against you, not your culture, if you want to be a hero and defend your people.

BachQ

#356

MN Dave

WHY MUST YOUR HEADLINES BE SO LARGE? WE ARE NOT RETARDED. WELL, I'M NOT.

$:)

:P

BachQ

Quote from: MN Dave on May 20, 2008, 08:11:33 AM
WHY MUST YOUR HEADLINES BE SO LARGE? WE ARE NOT RETARDED. WELL, I'M NOT.

What's a "headline"?

What does "large" mean?

What does "retarded" mean?