October 27, 2009: A Schubertiad for Brahms

Last March Paul Hersh organized a Faculty Artist Series concert last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music around the concept of the Schubertiad, defined in The Oxford Companion to Music as "an informal meeting of friends to sing, play, and listen."  That program consisted entirely  of Schubert's four-hand piano music, which Hersh performed with several different partners.  Last night in the Conservatory Recital Hall, he brought the concept to life again but this time with an evening of the music of Johannes Brahms.  The "friends" consisted of fellow faculty member pianist Yoshikazu Nagai, a vocal quartet of alumni (soprano Ann Moss, mezzo Amalia Martin, tenor Alan Cochran, and baritone Anders Froehlich), and three instrumental students, all of whom have been building up impressive professional resumes:  pianists Jeffrey LaDeur and Ian Scarfe, and cellist Michelle Kwon.  The works on the program were the Opus 56b Haydn variations, the two-piano setting performed by Nagai and LaDeur, an arrangement of the Opus 114 A minor clarinet trio with Hersh on viola taking the clarinet part, joined by Scarfe and Kwon, and the first set (Opus 52) of "Liebeslieder" waltzes with LaDeur and Hersh accompanying the vocal quartet.

As can be seen from the opus numbers, the evening covered two different periods of Brahms' life.  The outer works come from the period after the success of the 1868 German Requiem, which finally brought Brahms the recognition that he deserved (and that had been predicted by Robert Schumann, who had died in 1856).  The trio, on the other hand, is situated near the end of Brahms' life.  When this work was performed in the clarinet version in August, I wrote the following:

… Brahms composed his trio in 1890.  This was a time when he had been ready to give up composing until he met Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra.  This trio turned out to be the first of four works composed for Mühlfeld, the others being the Opus 115 quintet and the two Opus 120 sonatas.  All of these compositions have a sense of twilight about them, not only through the use of minor keys but also in a gentleness of rhetoric that can easily be taken as a valedictory reflection on past experiences.

Reflective as this trio may have been, Hersh observed in his comments before the performance that the work has prospective seeds that would develop in later compositions.  He had Scarfe play the closing theme of the first movement, which would emerge as the opening theme of the first of the Opus 121 Vier ernste Gesänge;  but also the piano's first motif in that movement is a triplet pattern that later emerges as and second theme in the fourth (rhapsody) of the four Opus 119 solo piano piece.  The trio is thus very much a pivotal moment in Brahms' final thoughts about composition.

Hersh also made some remarks about the struggle that had gone into preparing this performance.  Unfortunately, there were clear signs of that struggle, particularly in his own efforts to find the proper fit for the viola against the soaring passions of Kwon's cello and Scarfe's command of Brahms' pianistic rhetoric.  It may simply have been that the "formula" that enabled the translation of the Opus 120 sonatas from clarinet to viola did not apply as well to the instrumental and contrapuntal fabric of this trio.  The result was that the listener was left with glimpses of the potential of this composition but without a sense of that potential being realized.

Far more successful were the performances of the outer works of the program.  Here again the heart of the music owes much to that contrapuntal fabric.  By composing for two pianos, rather than the "Schubert style" of four hands on one keyboard, Brahms could weave the voices controlled by the two instruments closely among each other.  This never distorts the clarity of the theme or the strategy of each variation, but it results in a sophisticated blend of sonorities that is strikingly different from Brahms' conception of this work in its orchestral setting.  These sonorities tend to be more subtle than most recording systems can manage;  but, in last nights physical setting, Nagai and LaDeur could reveal them spatially, which made it clear just how ingenious Brahms had been in his setting.

This weaving of voices was also evident in the Opus 52 waltzes.  While the four vocalists have obviously different ranges, Brahms frequently brings them into close proximity.  Also, over the course of the eighteen waltzes in the set, he takes different approaches to deploying solos, duets, and trios, in addition to working with the quartet as a whole.  It is also worth noting that, while the waltzes are many, each one is brief.  The waltz form is probably the shortest of the structures Brahms engaged in his compositions, and it is probably only slightly hyperbolic to declare that every waltz he composed is a gem unto itself.  In the brief confines of that ternary form behind the minuet movements of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Brahms could tease out any number of harmonic twists among the turns of his contrapuntal lines, all with a lilting three-beat that totally changed the approach to music intended for dance.  Everything about this performance was a delight, from the broad range of vocal expressiveness of the quartet to the sure foundational support provided by the four-hand work of LaDeur and Hersh.  The Schubertiad concept could clearly do as much justice to Brahms has it had done for Schubert!