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Solzhenitsyn plays Brahms
Robert Zaller
Music for adults:
Solzhenitsyn plays Brahms at Curtis
ROBERT ZALLER
Not many composers can carry the entire program of a piano recital by themselves. Bach and Beethoven, of course; Schubert and Chopin; Schumann and Liszt. The list falls off sharply there. The piano expresses— perhaps one should say exposes— a composer’s sensibility as does no other instrument, and few can withstand such close and extended scrutiny.
What about Brahms?
Brahms holds a secure place in the repertoire of every genre he attempted, but somehow we don’t think of him— at least think of him first— as a composer for the piano. Yet his career started with a grand assault on what had been, since Beethoven, the defining form of the instrument, the sonata: Three of his first five opus numbers are piano sonatas. They are rarely played nowadays, and, although Brahms composed multiple sonatas for other instruments, he never wrote a fourth for piano. In this respect he followed the path of his mentor Schumann, whose three early piano sonatas are also largely ignored today.
But Brahms no more abandoned the piano than Schumann did, and most of his work through the Op. 35 Paganini variations are composed for that instrument. He returned to the piano periodically, and his career climaxed with the four great sets of Opp. 116-119. You could argue that no composer since has produced a more significant body of work for the keyboard.
But a whole piano program of Brahms?
The necessary ingredients
If you’re going to try it, you should pick a day like the one Ignat Solzhenitsyn had in the intimate surroundings of the Curtis Institute: a raw and blustery December Sunday afternoon with the kind of off-and-on rain that gets to the bone. You should also have Solzhenitsyn himself. Plenty of pianists play Brahms, of course, but no one today makes a specialty of Brahms the way, say, Wilhelm Kempff did. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t either, but he’s the kind of Russian who has Brahms in his blood— which is to say, a sixth sense for the melancholy that attracted Brahms himself to the Slavs, combined with a Baltic firmness that avoids excess. Richter comes to mind as a prototype.
Three of the four works on the program displayed a very youthful Brahms; all were written by the age of 21. This reminds us of something else we’re apt to forget: Although Brahms always seems so terribly mature, he was a tyro. The protégé whom Schumann hailed with his famous, “Hats off, gentlemen! A genius,” no doubt reminded the older man of his own youthful, plungingly Romantic self. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, with which Solzhenitsyn began, is, indeed, very Schumannesque in its middle section, which might almost be taken from Papillons. The abrupt, raking figure that opens the work is unmistakably Brahms, though, and assured in a way that seems beyond even the most precocious 18-year-old. This is music for adults.
The Germans have a word for it
Solzhenitsyn continued with a wonderfully sensitive reading of the Four Ballades, Op. 10, Brahms’s homage to Chopin and a major Romantic work whose inwardness alone can account for its neglect. The 16 Variations on a Theme of Schumann in F-sharp minor, Op. 9 that followed were more straightforward, but no less suffused with invention and feeling— Sennsucht, one should say, for only the German conveys the quality that particularly distinguishes Brahms’ pianistic style.
Finally came the Op. 118 Klavierstucke, which, if one can say it, wear their introspection lightly: a young-old Brahms to balance the old-young one of the early works.
It’s hard to comment on an all but flawless performance, so one must simply say that Mr. Solzhenitsyn thoroughly immersed himself in the music, and so immersed us. And yes, thank you, Brahms carries a program. You need only the right weather, and the right musician.
Solzhenitsyn plays Brahms at Curtis
ROBERT ZALLER
Not many composers can carry the entire program of a piano recital by themselves. Bach and Beethoven, of course; Schubert and Chopin; Schumann and Liszt. The list falls off sharply there. The piano expresses— perhaps one should say exposes— a composer’s sensibility as does no other instrument, and few can withstand such close and extended scrutiny.
What about Brahms?
Brahms holds a secure place in the repertoire of every genre he attempted, but somehow we don’t think of him— at least think of him first— as a composer for the piano. Yet his career started with a grand assault on what had been, since Beethoven, the defining form of the instrument, the sonata: Three of his first five opus numbers are piano sonatas. They are rarely played nowadays, and, although Brahms composed multiple sonatas for other instruments, he never wrote a fourth for piano. In this respect he followed the path of his mentor Schumann, whose three early piano sonatas are also largely ignored today.
But Brahms no more abandoned the piano than Schumann did, and most of his work through the Op. 35 Paganini variations are composed for that instrument. He returned to the piano periodically, and his career climaxed with the four great sets of Opp. 116-119. You could argue that no composer since has produced a more significant body of work for the keyboard.
But a whole piano program of Brahms?
The necessary ingredients
If you’re going to try it, you should pick a day like the one Ignat Solzhenitsyn had in the intimate surroundings of the Curtis Institute: a raw and blustery December Sunday afternoon with the kind of off-and-on rain that gets to the bone. You should also have Solzhenitsyn himself. Plenty of pianists play Brahms, of course, but no one today makes a specialty of Brahms the way, say, Wilhelm Kempff did. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t either, but he’s the kind of Russian who has Brahms in his blood— which is to say, a sixth sense for the melancholy that attracted Brahms himself to the Slavs, combined with a Baltic firmness that avoids excess. Richter comes to mind as a prototype.
Three of the four works on the program displayed a very youthful Brahms; all were written by the age of 21. This reminds us of something else we’re apt to forget: Although Brahms always seems so terribly mature, he was a tyro. The protégé whom Schumann hailed with his famous, “Hats off, gentlemen! A genius,” no doubt reminded the older man of his own youthful, plungingly Romantic self. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, with which Solzhenitsyn began, is, indeed, very Schumannesque in its middle section, which might almost be taken from Papillons. The abrupt, raking figure that opens the work is unmistakably Brahms, though, and assured in a way that seems beyond even the most precocious 18-year-old. This is music for adults.
The Germans have a word for it
Solzhenitsyn continued with a wonderfully sensitive reading of the Four Ballades, Op. 10, Brahms’s homage to Chopin and a major Romantic work whose inwardness alone can account for its neglect. The 16 Variations on a Theme of Schumann in F-sharp minor, Op. 9 that followed were more straightforward, but no less suffused with invention and feeling— Sennsucht, one should say, for only the German conveys the quality that particularly distinguishes Brahms’ pianistic style.
Finally came the Op. 118 Klavierstucke, which, if one can say it, wear their introspection lightly: a young-old Brahms to balance the old-young one of the early works.
It’s hard to comment on an all but flawless performance, so one must simply say that Mr. Solzhenitsyn thoroughly immersed himself in the music, and so immersed us. And yes, thank you, Brahms carries a program. You need only the right weather, and the right musician.
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