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Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op.
56b for Two Pianos (1873) |
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Pianist Emanuel Ax is renowned not only for his poetic temperament and unsurpassed virtuosity, but also for the exceptional breadth of his performing activity. Each season, his schedule includes appearances with major symphony orchestras worldwide, recitals in the most celebrated concert halls, a variety of chamber music collaborations, the commissioning and performance of new music, and additions to his acclaimed discography on Sony Classical. Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music with Mieczylaw Munz and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in French. Mr. Ax captured public attention in 1974 when, at age 25, he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, and four years later he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. Mr. Ax has been an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist since 1987. His newest releases on that label include period-instrument performances of the complete works for piano and orchestra by Chopin (on two discs) and the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In recent years, Mr. Ax has turned his attention toward the music of 20th-century composers, performing works by such diverse figures as William Bolcom, Aaron Copland, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Ezra Laderman, Peter Lieberson, André Previn, Christopher Rouse (world premiere of Seeing for piano and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic in May 1999), Joseph Schwantner, Bright Sheng (world premiere of Red Silk Dance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January 2000) and Sir Michael Tippett. In September 1997, Mr. Ax gave the world premiere performances of a new piano concerto, Century Rolls, by John Adams with The Cleveland Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnányi, followed in 1998 by the European premiere of the work with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has continued to play Adams's Century Rolls with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. Following reprise performances of Century Rolls with The Cleveland Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnányi in September 1999, the artists recorded the work for the Nonesuch label. In April 2000, Mr. Ax performed the New York premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall with The Cleveland Orchestra and Mr. Dohnányi. New music figures prominently in one of Mr. Ax's notable undertakings during the 2001-02 season: the world premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki's piano concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Wolfgang Sawallisch, which he will perform both in Philadelphia and in Carnegie Hall. Other highlights of Mr. Ax's season include a duo recital tour with pianist Yefim Bronfman and the gala opening concert of Philadelphia's new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, with Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Devoted to chamber music literature, Mr. Ax regularly collaborates with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma and Peter Serkin. Mr. Ax's two-piano program (with Yefim Bronfman) of works by Brahms and Rachmaninoff will be released by Sony Classical in conjunction with their tour this fall. Emanuel Ax made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 1976 and has appeared with the Orchestra frequently since, both in Cleveland and on tour. His most recent engagement with the Orchestra was during its Beethoven Festival in May 2001, in concerts that included the five Beethoven Piano Concertos and the "Triple" Concerto under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi. Mr. Ax also performed in chamber music concerts with members of the Orchestra and with the Emerson String Quartet. |
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piano Highlights of Mr. Bronfman's 2001-02 season schedule include appearances with the Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He also will tour the United States as soloist with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and join with pianist Emanuel Ax for a duo recital tour. Abroad, Mr. Bronfman appears with the Bayerische Rundfunk, Israel Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Sydney Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic, among other orchestras. Last summer featured appearances at the BBC Proms and at the Aspen, Bad Kissingen, Ravinia, Salzburg and Tanglewood festivals, as well as a series of concerts in the Far East. Mr. Bronfman has given numerous solo recitals in the leading halls of North America, Europe and the Far East, including acclaimed debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1989 and Avery Fisher Hall in 1993. A devoted chamber music performer, he has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Guarneri and Juilliard Quartets, as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He also has played chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, Cleveland, Shlomo Mintz, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Pinchas Zukerman, and many other artists. In 1991, he gave a series of joint recitals with Isaac Stern in Russia, marking Mr. Bronfman's first public performances there since his emigration to Israel at age 15. An exclusive Sony Classical recording artist, Mr. Bronfman has won widespread praise for his solo, chamber and orchestral recordings. He won a Grammy Award in 1997 for his recording of the three Bartók Piano Concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His discography also lists the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas; all five of the Prokofiev Piano Concertos, nominated for both Grammy and Gramophone magazine awards; Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3; and recordings with Isaac Stern including the violin-and-piano sonatas by Bartók, Brahms and Mozart. To coincide with the release of the Fantasia 2000 film soundtrack, Mr. Bronfman was featured on his own Shostakovich album, performing the two Piano Concertos and the Piano Quintet. Planned for release this season on Sony Classical is a two-piano recital CD with Emanuel Ax. Yefim Bronfman made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 1986. His eighth and most recent engagement with the Orchestra was in April 2000. |
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Both Brahms works on tonight's program are better known in their alternative
scorings for orchestra and piano quintet, respectively. Yet the two-piano
incarnations of these two masterpieces are by no means simple reductions,
secondary to the versions for larger performing forces. They are equivalent
to those versions in every way; upon hearing them, we may realize the
extent to which the sound of the piano - and especially the combination
of two pianos - was a generative force that helped shape the music in
Brahms's mind. Brahms was a superb pianist himself, and his first published works are compositions written for his own instrument. Even as his attention turned increasingly to chamber, choral, and finally symphonic music, he continued, in a certain sense, to think pianistically. In 1854, he started work on a two-piano sonata in D minor which he later attempted to turn into a symphony; yet the musical material needed the keyboard instrument so much that the work's first movement eventually ended up in the First Piano Concerto. The case of the F-minor sonata (Op.34bis), written in 1864, is somewhat different: this time the music started life as an unfinished string quintet with two cellos (à la Schubert) which Brahms destroyed. The realization that piano sound was called for came as the second stage of composition, resulting in one of the greatest works in the two-piano literature. Finally, Brahms combined both worlds in the piano-and-string-quartet version. As for the Haydn variations of 1873, the popular orchestral version does tend to overshadow the earlier two-piano setting, yet the piano writing is so idiomatic in the latter that it is not hard at all to accept it as a genuine piano composition. |
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Variations
on a Themeby Haydn, Op. 56b for Two Pianos (1873) The theme of the Haydn Variations is really not by Haydn at all, although
Brahms thought all his life that it was. For this reason, it seems utterly
pedantic to rename the work the "Variations on the St. Anthony Chorale,"
as has sometimes been done. It is true, however, that the composition
was based on an old song in honor of St. Anthony of Padua, found in a
wind octet whose manuscript Brahms's musicologist friend, Carl Ferdinand
Pohl (the author of the first scholarly biography of Haydn) had discovered.
Modern research attributes this wind octet to Haydn's student Ignaz Pleyel,
but this has no bearing either on the original chorale (which in any case
is neither Haydn nor Pleyel), or on what Brahms did with the melody in
his brilliant set of variations. Brahms was a supreme master of the variation form, which he used frequently
both in movements from longer works and in self-contained compositions.
The possibilities open in a Brahms variation set go well beyond ornamentation
or changes in tempo, meter or key. The chorale can become a passionate
song, a light-hearted game or a graceful pastorale, as the basic melody
gives rise to a whole series of new melodies. These share their underlying
structure with the original theme, but each new melody is an independent
entity, with a soul of its own. Brahms ended his variations with a passacaglia, that is, a set of variations within a variation. The theme is here transformed into a bass line that is repeated numerous times without change, providing a stable "ground" against which ever-changing counter-melodies are played. These mini-variations are arranged in a continuous movement whose progression is unbroken and completely seamless. The work closes with the original form of the St. Anthony chorale returning triumphantly in a full fortissimo. —Peter Laki |
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Sonata in F minor, Op. 34bis for
Two Pianos (1864) The F-minor Sonata bursts with energy, power, and that serious yet not
austere bearing so characteristic of Brahms. The first of its four movements
opens with a dark theme played in unison; the elements of this theme will
generate much of the musical material of the entire work. Only occasionally
tempered by the gentle lyricism of a second theme, this movement is unremittingly
dramatic. Unusual tonal relationships - with the movement's secondary
key a half-step higher than expected - increase the intensity of the musical
processes. The "Andante, un poco Adagio" that follows is a calm, song-like
movement in a regular A - B - A form that, with its sweet parallel thirds
and sixths, is like a Romantic drem. Yet even here, the harmonic movement
"overshoots the mark" by a half-step (going from A-flat major
into E major, not the expected E-flat), giving the music an extra edge
of tension. The third movement, now mysterious, now heroic in mood, was descibed
as "perhaps the most 'demonic' of Brahms scherzi" by Malcolm
MacDonald, author of an excellent survey of Brahms's life and work. The
scherzo is characterized by an irresistible rhythmic drive that persists
even in the Trio, where the gloomy C-minor tonality temporarily changes
to major. After a gloomy slow introduction, the Finale presents a serene and relaxed
main theme that, however, alternates with stormier episodes; near the
end, the music again assumes the impassioned tone of the first movement. Brahms himself played the first performance of the F-minor sonata with Carl Tausig, a remarkable young virtuoso who died tragically early. Brahms's lifelong friend, the great pianist Clara Schumann (Robert's widow) also played through the work with conductor Hermann Levi on second piano, and wrote to the composer:
Brahms did recast the work, but not for orchestra. Reluctant to let go of the piano sound, he decided in favor of the piano quintet (this medium may in fact have been suggested to him by Hermann Levi). It was in this form that Op.34 was published in 1865 and became a classic of the chamber-music literature. Yet in 1871, Brahms decided to publish the two-piano version as well. From a composer who destroyed so much of what he had written, this can only be taken as a ringing endorsement - one that has been amply validated by the sonata's performance history. —Peter Laki |
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Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, Op.
17 (1901) Composed exactly a century ago, the same year as the Piano Concerto No.2
(Op.18), the Second Suite for Two Pianos* is one of Rachmaninoff's most
effervescent compositions. Unlike the concerto which is in turn brooding,
sentimental, and heroic, the suite is buoyant and cheerful from beginning
to end. Even the slow movement, the gentle Romance, is more playful than
melancholy. It is hard to believe that the man who wrote this music had,
only a few months earlier, been in the throes of a severe depression that
made it impossible for him to compose for almost four years. There is
absolutely no trace of all this in the Suite - thanks, by Rachmaninoff's
own admission, to the cure effected by the hypnotherapist Dr. Dahl. The four movements of the suite bubble over with melodic invention. Both
piano parts make enormous technical demands on the players, as one might
expect from a virtuoso of Rachmaninoff's caliber; yet despite the profusion
of fast notes, nothing gets covered up, and the texture maintains an admirable
transparence throughout. The heavy opening chords of the first-movement March soon dissolve to
allow the singing second theme to come to the fore, but eventually returns
when it is time for the recapitulation to begin. Yet all these massive
harmonies yield, in the end, to a mysterious coda in pianissimo
dynamics. The second movement is titled "Waltz," but who could dance
a waltz at such a breakneck speed? The typical formulas of the waltz are
turned into elements in a virtuosic scherzo-fantasy in which the technical
difficulties are compounded by rhythmic irregularities caused by the constant
incursions of duple time into the waltz's quick ¾ meter. Interestingly,
Rachmaninoff managed to insert the first four notes of his favorite melody,
the Gregorian sequence Dies irae, even in this exuberant movement,
but he couldn't possibly have intended the melody's original connotations
about the Last Judgment; at most, the waltz may become a "Valse triste"
for a few moments as its tempo becomes somewhat - but only somewhat -
slower. At the end of the movement, the music seems to vanish into thin
air as both pianists play with their right hands only in the upper register
of their instruments. The third-movement romance offers a whole string of gorgeous melodies
in Rachmaninoff's most lyrical vein, lushly harmonized. But at one point
the figurations become so rapid that one gets the impression of listening
to another fast movement. Then in the slow coda, where the harmonies become
particularly poignant, the dreamy atmosphere is not only restored but
made even stronger. The last movement is a tarantella whose theme, according to Rachmaninoff's
own footnote in the score, is an actual Italian folksong. There is seemingly
no end to the subtle rhythmic games that the composer plays with that
theme, which traverses a number of different keys and is treated with
all the virtuosity two pianists can collectively muster. The delicious
romp ends with a series of energetic chords reminiscent of the march with
which the work opened. Rachmaninoff's original partner in the Second Suite was his cousin, the pianist-composer Alexander Siloti, who was not only a first-rate musician but also a wealthy man who was able to support Rachmaninoff financially so that the latter could devote himself to composition full-time. About forty years later, Rachmaninoff played through the suite with Vladimir Horowitz at his home in California, and they were planning a public performance of it at the time of Rachmaninoff's death.
—Peter Laki |
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