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Maneval improves on Brahms
Tom Purdom
Can a composer improve on Brahms?
Philip Maneval shows us how
TOM PURDOM
There’s a story about a young English major who took a job in a publishing house and rejected a novel because “Joseph Conrad had already written a book on the same theme.”
In publishing, almost everyone would agree that’s a silly attitude. Publishers don’t stop publishing private eye novels— and mystery readers don’t stop buying them— because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a classic series in the 19th Century. But contemporary composers face a different mindset. If they produce a composition the classical music audience can relate to, critics will often dismiss it on the grounds that Brahms or Beethoven have already mined that vein. If they try to produce something “innovative” or “experimental,” it will probably sound like the disconnected series of beeps and twangs that American academic composers inflicted on American audiences during much of the last half of the 20th Century.
In the past 15 years, contemporary composers have made a serious attempt to find the balance between weak imitations and ugly novelty. Philip Maneval took up the challenge head-on when he decided to produce a successor to one of the best-loved master works in the chamber repertoire—the Brahms trio for piano, violin and horn.
A love affair with Brahms
Brahms put together a powerful combination of instruments when he substituted the horn for the cello in the standard piano trio ensemble. I knew almost nothing about chamber music when I bought a vinyl recording of the trio a little after I first began collecting records more than half a century ago, but the combination of tone colors struck my fancy and I knew I liked the sound of the horn. I had become friendly with a horn player when I was putting in my two years in the army and he had introduced me to the other peak in the horn player’s repertoire: the Mozart horn concertos. He had also advised me that musicians and knowledgeable listeners never refer to the instrument as the French horn (a bit of knowledge that Spec Four Purdom of the 69th Armor immediately adopted as a badge of musical sophistication).
I loved the trio as soon as the opening notes flowed through the (single) loudspeaker on my 1961 set of components. The years have only strengthened the bond. Any program that features the Brahms trio immediately becomes a must-hear item on my calendar. Any program that features a possible companion has to compete with all the memories I’ve accumulated during my 40-year affair with the original.
Passion, poetry…. and a horn
The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented the first public performance of Maneval’s trio just before Christmas, and it was one of the big moments in my decades of concertgoing. Maneval has produced a piece that should appeal to anybody who values the Brahms. If you like the Brahms, you will like the Maneval because it exudes the same poetry and passion. But you will also like it because it’s really a different piece of music, with its own approach to the possibilities of the piano, violin and horn combination.
The most obvious difference between the Maneval and the Brahms is the prominence Maneval gives to the horn. There’s a natural tendency to focus on the horn when you hear the Brahms; but Brahms actually gives most of the best music to the violin and the piano. The horn gets its moments with Brahms, but mostly it supports and colors the other instruments. Maneval makes the horn an equal partner.
A wilder elegy
Maneval’s trio is also written for the modern horn— a fact that Maneval emphasizes by using the term “French horn” in the title. The Brahms is normally played on the modern horn, but it was actually composed for an older, gentler instrument: the valveless “natural” horn.
The second movement of the Brahms is an elegy that was probably influenced by the death of the composer’s mother. The second movement of the Maneval is also elegiac, but it’s interrupted by a wilder middle section. The somber sections of the movement share more in common with the Brahms, but they still bear the stamp of another mind. They are different in the same way an early-21st-Century sensibility differs from a 19th-Century sensibility— or the way one composer’s personality differs from another’s.
The challenge for reviewers
This is a hard kind of piece to review. If a composer creates a work that contains an obvious technical novelty, the reviewer can write interesting copy— and capture some of its quality— by focusing on the novelty. For creations like this one, all you can do is offer your own subjective reaction. But sometimes a subjective reaction is the important information. So here’s the opinion of someone who’s probably heard every performance of the Brahms trio that’s been presented in Philadelphia in the past 18 years:
If you like the Brahms, you’ll like the Maneval.
If you love the Brahms, you’ll love the Maneval.
If you really love the Brahms, you’ll really love the Maneval.
Philip Maneval shows us how
TOM PURDOM
There’s a story about a young English major who took a job in a publishing house and rejected a novel because “Joseph Conrad had already written a book on the same theme.”
In publishing, almost everyone would agree that’s a silly attitude. Publishers don’t stop publishing private eye novels— and mystery readers don’t stop buying them— because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a classic series in the 19th Century. But contemporary composers face a different mindset. If they produce a composition the classical music audience can relate to, critics will often dismiss it on the grounds that Brahms or Beethoven have already mined that vein. If they try to produce something “innovative” or “experimental,” it will probably sound like the disconnected series of beeps and twangs that American academic composers inflicted on American audiences during much of the last half of the 20th Century.
In the past 15 years, contemporary composers have made a serious attempt to find the balance between weak imitations and ugly novelty. Philip Maneval took up the challenge head-on when he decided to produce a successor to one of the best-loved master works in the chamber repertoire—the Brahms trio for piano, violin and horn.
A love affair with Brahms
Brahms put together a powerful combination of instruments when he substituted the horn for the cello in the standard piano trio ensemble. I knew almost nothing about chamber music when I bought a vinyl recording of the trio a little after I first began collecting records more than half a century ago, but the combination of tone colors struck my fancy and I knew I liked the sound of the horn. I had become friendly with a horn player when I was putting in my two years in the army and he had introduced me to the other peak in the horn player’s repertoire: the Mozart horn concertos. He had also advised me that musicians and knowledgeable listeners never refer to the instrument as the French horn (a bit of knowledge that Spec Four Purdom of the 69th Armor immediately adopted as a badge of musical sophistication).
I loved the trio as soon as the opening notes flowed through the (single) loudspeaker on my 1961 set of components. The years have only strengthened the bond. Any program that features the Brahms trio immediately becomes a must-hear item on my calendar. Any program that features a possible companion has to compete with all the memories I’ve accumulated during my 40-year affair with the original.
Passion, poetry…. and a horn
The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented the first public performance of Maneval’s trio just before Christmas, and it was one of the big moments in my decades of concertgoing. Maneval has produced a piece that should appeal to anybody who values the Brahms. If you like the Brahms, you will like the Maneval because it exudes the same poetry and passion. But you will also like it because it’s really a different piece of music, with its own approach to the possibilities of the piano, violin and horn combination.
The most obvious difference between the Maneval and the Brahms is the prominence Maneval gives to the horn. There’s a natural tendency to focus on the horn when you hear the Brahms; but Brahms actually gives most of the best music to the violin and the piano. The horn gets its moments with Brahms, but mostly it supports and colors the other instruments. Maneval makes the horn an equal partner.
A wilder elegy
Maneval’s trio is also written for the modern horn— a fact that Maneval emphasizes by using the term “French horn” in the title. The Brahms is normally played on the modern horn, but it was actually composed for an older, gentler instrument: the valveless “natural” horn.
The second movement of the Brahms is an elegy that was probably influenced by the death of the composer’s mother. The second movement of the Maneval is also elegiac, but it’s interrupted by a wilder middle section. The somber sections of the movement share more in common with the Brahms, but they still bear the stamp of another mind. They are different in the same way an early-21st-Century sensibility differs from a 19th-Century sensibility— or the way one composer’s personality differs from another’s.
The challenge for reviewers
This is a hard kind of piece to review. If a composer creates a work that contains an obvious technical novelty, the reviewer can write interesting copy— and capture some of its quality— by focusing on the novelty. For creations like this one, all you can do is offer your own subjective reaction. But sometimes a subjective reaction is the important information. So here’s the opinion of someone who’s probably heard every performance of the Brahms trio that’s been presented in Philadelphia in the past 18 years:
If you like the Brahms, you’ll like the Maneval.
If you love the Brahms, you’ll love the Maneval.
If you really love the Brahms, you’ll really love the Maneval.
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