November 13, 2009: The Berlin Philharmonic presents Brahms in two guises

The first program that Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic will bring to Davies Symphony Hall next Friday evening, November 20, will be the same program that they presented on Wednesday night in Carnegie Hall.  The first half of the program will consist of Johannes Brahms' first piano quartet, Opus 25 in G minor, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg;  and the second half will be a performance of Brahms' first symphony, Opus 68 in C minor, providing a fascinating comparison of Brahms' own orchestral skills with those later conceived by Schoenberg.  There is a letter, frequently cited in music history classes, that Schoenberg wrote on March 18, 1939 to Alfred Frankenstein, then Music Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, that provides valuable background for understanding his decision to orchestrate this particular piece of Brahms chamber music.  In the letter Schoenberg enumerated three reasons for undertaking the project:

1. I like this piece.
2. It is seldom played.
3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings.  I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.

If nothing else, these reasons should allow us to appreciate how much the performance of chamber music has progressed over the last seventy years.  In Los Angeles (from which Schoenberg wrote his letter) alone, during the four years when I was working there, I had several opportunities to hear this piano quartet performed by both seasoned professionals and students at several different levels of development;  and none of them were "very badly played!"  Indeed, pertaining to Schoenberg's third reason, while all three of the Brahms piano quartets might be construed (as I have previously suggested) as "concertos for piano and very small orchestra," every performance I have heard in any city has always had a keen sense of balance between the piano and the strings.  I suspect that this is less a matter of my being incredibly lucky and more one of the prodigious progress of music education in this country!

This brings us to the second enumeration in Schoenberg's letter.  Here he states the two intentions with which he approached his orchestration project:

1. To remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not to go further then [sic] he himself would have gone if he lived today.
2. To watch carefully all these laws which Brahms obeyed and not to violate [any of those] which are only known to musicians educated in his environment.

Schoenberg probably wrote this letter in response to Frankenstein's impressions of the first performance of his effort, which took place in Los Angeles on May 7, 1938, with Otto Klemperer presumably conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  I know very little about the quality of the Philharmonic in those days, nor do I know what Frankenstein wrote (if anything) about the performance.  However, I think it would be fair today to say that Schoenberg fell short of his intentions as much as he did with his reasons.  Nevertheless, in spite of the weakness of his argumentation, the result is a valuable addition to the symphonic repertoire, not only revealing a side of Schoenberg that received little exposure but also viewing Brahms through a lens that can inform performances of the original chamber music.

Anyone familiar with Brahms' orchestral repertoire quickly recognizes that this music does not have a "Brahms sound."  Clearly, it also does not have the sound of Schoenberg utilizing orchestration to clarify the underlying structures of his serial composition;  nor does it reflect the experimental approach of his attempt in "Farben" to compose directly with sound itself.  Rather, the music is a reflection on the past, not only to 1861, when the piano quartet was composed, but to the early twentieth century, when Schoenberg was deploying the full extent of the orchestra in his Gurrelieder.  However, beyond the richness of his orchestral palette is the perspective he brings to Brahms, which may be as valid for the chamber music as it is for the orchestration.  This involves the extent to which Schoenberg has found extensive wit in Brahms' score.

There is no question that Opus 25 is the wittiest of the three piano quartets.  That deal is sealed by the madcap Rondo alla zingarese that concludes the composition and the almost-as-loopy parade that interrupts what would otherwise have been a typically reflective Andante con moto in the third movement.  However, that sense of wit can be found in some of the throwaway gestures of the second-movement Intermezzo and may even account for the mood swings of the opening movement.  If Schoenberg made these instances of wit more evident through his orchestration (and some may be surprised that Schoenberg did not shy away from attributes like "loopy"), then he has also helped all of us to hear them when they surface in chamber music performances.

Rattle's interpretation of the Schoenberg orchestration is now in the archives of the performances available through the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall, and it is probably a good indicator of what we can expect next Friday evening in Davies.  The Berlin Philharmonic certainly has the resources necessary to do justice to Schoenberg's rich orchestration, and Rattle manages those resources with a control that gives equal attention to Brahms' source and Schoenberg's conception of that source.  He has also clued into the that sense of wit that first emerges in the opening movement and is blatantly exuberant by the time we have made the journey to the conclusion.  It is a reading that is both spirited and sensible, going beyond any weakness in Schoenberg's own argumentation to the brilliant core of the music itself.

The Opus 68 symphony is not in the recent Digital Concert Hall archives, but one can get a foretaste of next Friday's performance through the recent EMI recording of Brahms’ complete symphonies that Rattle made with the Berlin Philharmonic.  Here one encounters another performance that finds the proper balance of the spirited and the sensible.  Particularly in the outer movements, this is a symphony in which Brahms lays out a few basic materials in clear statements at the very beginning;  and, having presented those materials, he proceeds to turn them around and explore them both individually and in combination through a variety of developmental techniques.  None of those techniques are particularly novel, but the exploration of the content still emerges as highly inventive.  At the same time Brahms engages rhetorical strategies through which those inventions are charged with expressive emotion.  It is all too easy for less skilled conductors to allow those expressions to deteriorate into mawkish sentimentality, but Rattle keeps their intensity under control by always holding them in line with the elaborate syntax of Brahms' structural relations.

Next Friday thus promises to be an evening when we shall learn new things about listening to Brahms.  Given the many opportunities we have to hear Brahms in this City, particularly his chamber music, those lessons are likely to impact future listening experiences.  Tickets are available at the San Francisco Symphony Box Office at Davies Symphony Hall or may be ordered by phone at 415-864-6000 or through the events page on the San Francisco Symphony Web site.