BRAHMS. Symphonies Nos. 1 4 Serenades Nos. 1 & 2 Variations on a theme by Haydn. István Kertész

Transcription

1 Eloq uence BRAHMS Symphonies Nos. 1 4 Serenades Nos. 1 & 2 Variations on a theme by Haydn István Kertész

2

3 JOHANNES BRAHMS ( ) CD Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op I Un poco sostenuto II Andante sostenuto III Un poco allegretto e grazioso IV Adagio Più andante Allegro non troppo ma con brio Più allegro Variations on a theme by Haydn, Op. 56a CD Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op I Allegro non troppo II Adagio non troppo L istesso tempo, ma grazioso III Allegro grazioso Presto ma non assai IV Allegro con spirito 9 18 CD Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op I Allegro con brio II Andante III Poco allegretto IV Allegro 8 59 Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op I Allegro non troppo II Andante moderato III Allegro giocoso IV Allegro energico e passionato Wiener Philharmoniker István Kertész

4 CD Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op I Allegro molto II Scherzo: Allegro non troppo III Adagio non troppo IV Menuetto V Scherzo: Allegro VI Allegro 5 39 Serenade No. 2 in A major, Op I Allegro moderato II Scherzo vivace III Adagio non troppo IV Quasi menuetto 4 59! V Rondo: Allegro 6 18 London Symphony Orchestra István Kertész Total timing:

5 Johannes Brahms s earliest orchestral works reveal him to have struggled long with the idea of composing a symphony, while continually pushing the thought aside. On 27 July 1854, Brahms told his friend Joseph Joachim that he was working on a piece that was now intended to become a symphony, but which had originally been conceived as a sonata for two pianos. In the letter evident doubts are expressed, with Brahms writing, for example, that he does not know whether it is particularly well suited to an orchestra. He goes on: Would you encourage me to go on with the other movements? I feel rather presumptuous. Soon afterwards, the sketches for the symphony were turned into the First Piano Concerto, with the draft originally intended for the Scherzo being worked into the second movement of the German Requiem ( For all flesh is grass ). In addition to his lack of confidence in writing for an orchestra and his lack of experience in the matter of instrumentation, Brahms was intimidated by what seemed to be the impossibly high demands of the symphonic genre in the wake of Ludwig van Beethoven. As late as the beginning of the 1870s, when Brahms had been working on his First Symphony for a considerable length of time, he wrote in a letter to the conductor Hermann Levi: I shall never compose a symphony! You have no idea what it feels like to hear a giant like that marching along behind you all the time. The giant Beethoven had attained heights with his nine symphonies which seemed to render any further independent development of the genre impossible for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in the years , Brahms wrote two serenades for orchestra an attempt to draw closer to the symphonic genre without having to live up to all of its demands. His awareness of this fact is demonstrated once more in a letter to Joseph Joachim of 8 December 1858, in which he asks his friend for manuscript paper. He wrote: I need the paper in order to transform the First Serenade into a symphony after all. I can see that, as it stands, the work is neither one thing nor the other. I had such fine, grand ideas about my first symphony, and now look at me! During this period Brahms was choirmaster at the Court in Detmold, where an orchestra with outstandingly good wind players kept the late eighteenth-century tradition of the serenade alive. Both works (Op. 11 and Op. 16) follow in the tradition of Mozart s great serenades. In spite of the widely varying judgements made on my works, I must say that I am very pleased at my first attempts at writing for orchestra and

6 I certainly hope they will find favour with audiences in Detmold too. So wrote Brahms in March 1859, a few days before this first public performance of his D major Serenade. Joseph Joachim conducted the first performance of the work on 28 March 1859 in Hamburg in its original version for nine instruments, the score of which has since been lost. This performance was evidently quite a success, for on the following day Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann: The concert appears to have gone fairly well. The audience kept up the applause until I appeared on stage You would not have recognised the people of Hamburg. In the following months, Brahms made an arrangement for piano duet and revised his score for a larger orchestra. This version described by Joachim as a Symphonic Serenade was published at the end of 1860 by Breitkopf & Härtel. Brahms was evidently quite pleased with his Second Serenade in A major, as he wrote to Clara Schumann on 17 January 1860, a few months after it was completed: I conducted a rehearsal of my Second Serenade in Hanover. Joachim agreed with me that it sounded well. What a friend I have in him! On 10 February the work was given its first performance at a private concert by the Philharmonic in Hamburg, conducted by the composer. Soon afterwards, in November of that same year, the score of Op. 16 was published along with the individual instrumental parts and an arrangement for piano four-hands. In a sense, the Variations, Op. 56a, composed in the summer of 1873, represent the last stopping-point on the long road towards writing a symphony. The theme is drawn from a Partita in B flat major, originally attributed to Joseph Haydn, bearing the title St. Anthony s Chorale. Brahms adapted the chorale theme in eight variations followed by a passacaglia. The individual sections are so arranged as to produce an effect of cumulative intensification through increasing motivic tempo. The composer himself conducted the first performance of his Haydn Variations, on 2 November 1873, in the Great Hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna; the concert was a great success. Not until three years later, in the summer of 1876, did Brahms complete work on his First Symphony. He had started work on the composition by 1862 at the latest, as in the June of that year he was already able to send the score of the first movement to Clara Schumann (though without its slow introduction). Many of the details point quite plainly to Beethoven, such as the underlying key of C minor, the wonderful

7 final culmination in C major or the main theme of the Finale with its unmistakable echoes of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven s Ninth. Hans von Bülow in his day coined the expression, Beethoven s Tenth, which has often since been quoted. And yet the Symphony stands entirely on its own merits as the work in which Brahms succeeded in establishing a motivic continuity between all four symphonic movements. The embryonic motif is contained in the slow introduction to the opening movement (sostenuto), the strings and wind in opposing chromatic lines over ostinato quavers on the timpani and bass. The principle of working through motivic and thematic material, previously largely confined to the development sections of the outer movements, is here extended to almost all sections, even the central movements. No other work took Brahms as long to produce as his first-born symphony yet another indication of his lack of confidence. But when Otto Dessoff raised his baton for the first performance of the First Symphony on 4 November 1876, in the theatre at the Archduke s court in Karlsruhe, the hex seems to have been lifted. The subsequent symphony, No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was completed by the following year. Brahms composed the work between June and September 1877 in Pörtschach by the Wörthersee. Dating from this time is a letter from the Viennese critic, Eduard Hanslick: I am deeply grateful to you, and by way of thanks, this winter I will have a symphony played to you that sounds so cheerful and sweet that you will think I have written it especially for you, or even your young wife! There s nothing clever about it, you will say; Brahms is a sly one! The Wörthersee is untrodden ground, with melodies flying about so fast that you need to watch that you don t step on any of them. Thus the Second Symphony, with its cheerful, sunny underlying key is often seen as a counterpart to Beethoven s Pastoral Symphony. Theodor Billroth, for instance, with whom Brahms rehearsed his arrangement of the work for piano four-hands, commented: Here are unspoken blue skies, bubbling springs, sunshine and cool green shadows! Because of the idyllic fundamental nature of the symphony, its very precise thematic construction is often overlooked. As in the First Symphony, here too there are common motifs linking the four movements together. The original motif is formed by the three-note sequence on the cellos and double-basses with which the work opens. This idea reappears in many different forms and characterises

8 important sections in all the movements. The first performance of the Second Symphony, which took place on 30 December 1877, in the concert hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, was a resounding success. From then on, Brahms was numbered among the great symphonic composers of the nineteenth century. Six years later, in the summer of 1883, he completed his Third Symphony in F major. Antonín Dvořák, to whom Brahms played the work soon after its completion, wrote to the publisher, Simrock, I tell you without exaggeration that this work towers above his first two symphonies; perhaps not in the scale and power of its conception, but through its sheer beauty! It evokes a mood that is rare in Brahms s work. What wonderful melodies it contains! They touch the heart. Mark my words: when you hear the Symphony, you will say that my appraisal was just. The first performance took place on 2 December 1883 in the Vienna Musikverein under Hans Richter. Early the following year the symphony was heard in Berlin, Wiesbaden, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. Brahms made a few last revisions before it was printed in The Third is perhaps the most individual of Brahms s symphonies. It has certainly invited a great variety of interpretations. Hans Richter called it an Eroica, while Brahms s biographer, Max Kalbeck, spoke of a Faust Symphony, and Clara Schumann believed she could hear the magic of the forest. Brahms here continued to work out and develop themes and motifs down to the last detail a principle which he had tried out in his first two symphonies and in most of the chamber music he had written up till then. The motif of a third plus a sixth which opens the first movement goes on to form the basis for all four movements. The final sections of the two outer movements are particularly notable for their mood of calm restraint. Brahms composed his last symphony in two parts: the first two movements were written in the summer of 1884, and the third and fourth movements were completed the following summer. The first performance was conducted by Brahms himself, on 25 October 1885, in a subscription concert given by the Meiningen Court Orchestra. The Fourth has been seen as Brahms s most important contribution to the genre, as it forms a synthesis of the ideas contained in the three preceding symphonies. The principle of continual development, with intense motivic and thematic variation, pervades the final movement. Here Brahms drew upon the ancient form of the passacaglia. As early as

9 February 1869 he wrote to the Dessau Councillor, Adolf Schubring, of his fondness for the technique of variation on an ostinato bass: with a theme and variation it is really only the bass line which is important to me. [ ] If I use just the melody as the basis for variations, I find it hard to do any more than make something witty or charming or elaborate on a lovely idea. Over a given bass line, however, I become truly innovative: I create new melodies. The passacaglia theme itself clearly derives from the final chorus of J.S. Bach s Cantata BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlangt mich (Lord, my heart desires thee). than the richness and beauty of individual details, appeals to me so much that I almost think the E minor is my favourite of the four symphonies. Thomas Sick Translation: Julia S. Rushworth Decca 1996 Among Brahms s circle of friends, the Fourth Symphony met with some cautious, somewhat baffled responses. Thus Elisabet von Herzogenberg wrote at the end of September 1885: It seems to me as though this particular work has been too carefully designed for inspection through a microscope, as though its charms were not open to just any music-lover, as though it were a tiny world for the clever and the initiated. Joseph Joachim, however, thought very highly indeed of the Fourth Symphony, as he showed in a letter of 1886 to Brahms: The thrilling tension of the whole work, the concentration of feeling, the wonderfully intertwined development of motifs, even more

10 PHOTO: DECCA/ELFRIEDE HANAK István Kertész, born in 1929, trained as a conductor, composer and violinist in his native Budapest. He and his immediate family stood their ground during the German invasion of Hungary Kertész was Jewish and the Soviet takeover. Ultimately, however, he left his homeland in 1957, shortly after the Hungarian Revolution had been put down by Soviet forces. Appointments in Augsburg and Cologne were followed by his being named Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where he succeeded Pierre Monteux. He served in that role between 1965 and He was only 43 when he drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel. In addition to his highly acclaimed Mozart recordings, he also recorded the complete symphonies of Schubert and Dvořák for Decca. His Wiener Philharmoniker Brahms cycle began in May 1964 with a recording of the Second Symphony and continued in with the remaining symphonies and the Variations on a theme of Haydn. Recording of the Variations commenced on 1 March 1972, and upon Kertész s passing (16 April 1973), the orchestra completed the recording on 14 May 1973, conductor-less, in his memory. István Kertész

11 BRUCKNER: Symphony No BRAHMS: Symphonies Nos. 1-4; Serenades Nos. 1 & 2; Haydn Variations (4CD) DVOŘAK: Symphony No. 9; Serenade for wind instruments DVOŘAK: Requiem. ROSSINI: Stabat Mater (2CD) DVOŘAK: Overtures & Tone Poems (2CD) KODÁLY: Choral works. BARTÓK: Cantata profana (2CD) ISTVÁN KERTÉSZ on DECCA ELOQUENCE KODÁLY: The Peacock; Peacock Variations; Hary Janos: suite; Dances of Galanta KODÁLY: Hary Janos. BARTÓK: Duke Bluebeard's Castle (2CD) MOZART: Requiem; Masonic Music MOZART: Symphonies Nos. 25, 29, 35 Haffner MOZART: Symphonies Nos. 33, 39, MOZART: Symphony No. 36 Linz ; Eine kleine Nachtmusik; March in C; Overtures MOZART OPERA FESTIVAL RESPIGHI: Pines of Rome; Fountains of Rome; The Birds SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY Recording producers: Christopher Raeburn (Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 4, Variations); Ray Minshull (Symphony No. 2); Erik Smith (Serenades) Recording engineers: James Lock (Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 4, Variations); Gordon Parry (Symphony No. 2, Serenade No. 1); Kenneth Wilkinson (Serenade No. 2) Recording locations: Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, May 1964 (Symphony No. 2), November 1972 (Symphony No. 4), February 1973 (Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3), March & May 1973 (Variations); Kingsway Hall, London, October 1967 (Serenade No. 1), December 1967 (Serenade No. 2) Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Art direction: Chilu Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt

12