DownWithTyranny!: Sunday Classics: Thinking of the "snorting and grunting" Brahms's "inwardly restless and propulsive" piano playing

Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and husband Daniel Barenboim play the third-movement Allegro passionato of the Brahms F major Cello Sonata, the movement we heard in this week's preview.

by Ken

For this week's preview I seized on a quote included by the program notes for the performance of Brahms's Second Cello Sonata I heard recently, with the fine young cellist Dmitry Kouzov, in British pianist-conductor-professor Ian Hobson's 14-concert New York series of "The Complete Solo Piano and Chamber Music with Piano of Johannes Brahms," under the general title Brahms: Classical Inclinations in a Romantic Age. (There are still two concerts remaining in the series: a viola-and-piano evening this Tuesday, which I'm going to, and a final solo-piano program on Thursday.)

The quote was from a letter written to Brahms by the pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg shortly after the composer gave the first public performance of this sonata in Vienna with the artist for whom it was written, Robert Hausmann, the cellist of the great violinist Joseph Joachim's string quartet and an enthusiastic exponent of Brahms's First Cello Sonata, writtten more than 20 years earlier. (The solo parts of the great Double Concerto were written with Joachim and Hausmann in mind.) Von Herzogenberg had herself been playing the sonata with Hausmann, and this portion of her letter was included in the little book containing program notes for all 14 concerts. Since the introduction, and only the introduction, is credited to Paul Griffiths, I'm assuming that all the annotations are by Professor Hobson, but I don't see any credit to that effect, so I'm referring to the author as "Ian Hobson Annotator" (IHA).

IHA tells us that just over a week after the Vienna premiere, on November 24, 1986, von Herzogenberg wrote to Brahms "with an appreciation that is valuable not least for what it tells us about the composer's piano playing":

The piece is so greatly compressed; how it surges forward! The concise development is so exciting, and the augmented return of the first theme is such a surprise! Needless to say, we reveled in the beautiful warm sounds of the Adagio, and especially at the magnificent moment when we find ourselves again in F-sharp major, which sounds so marvelous. I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive.

I ACTUALLY MEANT TO TALK ABOUT A WORK ON
A LATER PROGRAM, THE C MINOR PIANO QUARTET

I've had my eye on the third of Brahms's three piano quartets for some time. It's a notably more concise and (for me) enigmatic work than the first two, and ever since the A major Quartet (No. 2) edged out the G minor (No. 1) in my affections, I've had this feeling that the C minor was just waiting to pop in my consciousness. It happened in the performance with violinist Andrés Cárdenes, violist Csaba Erdélyri, and cellist Ko Iwasaki, which interestingly followed a nice enough but kind of rambling performance of the gorgeous but more discursive A major Quartet. Naturally I assumed I would try to write about the C minor Quartet, but having diipped into the F major Cello Sonata, I thought we really should listen to the whole piece -- guided by Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and the Ian Hobson Annotator.

While von Herzogenberg's image of Brahms "snorting and grunting" applies specifically to the third movement, her evocation of the movement's "driving power and energy" and her imagining of the composer's playing of it as "agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive," suggests a very different image of the composer's music from the one performers so often present, bloated and rambling. It's not a matter of tempo, but of musical energy and purpose. I'm listening here for the extent to which each of our performing teams finds this inner movement in the music. (The three performances of the scherzo are the same ones we heard in the preview.)

A note on nomenclature: Brahms specifically called both the E minor and F major Sonatas "sonata for piano and cello," and I followed his form in the preview. Today I'm reverting to my standard "cello sonata."

BRAHMS: Cello Sonata No. 2 in F, Op. 99

i. Allegro molto

EVH: The piece is so greatly compressed; how it surges forward! The concise development is so exciting, and the augmented return of the first theme is such a surprise!
IHA: Elisabeth von Herzogenberg is right about the first movement, whose main theme rushes into action with immediate dynamism and vigor. The cello sounds off bold short-long-short patterns that do indeed come back decelerated a piano chords at the end of the development, the cello meanwhile maintaining a long tremolando stretch to create an extraordinary texture. An earlier stretch of cello tremolando comes at the close of the exposition, after the piano has announced the second subject in a charge of gloriously sunny chords. The recapitulation presses on into a coda where the two themes, united, give birth to a third.

Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Rudolf Serkin, piano. DG, recorded 1982

ii. Adagio affettuoso

EVH: Needless to say, we reveled in the beautiful warm sounds of the Adagio, and especially at the magnificent moment when we find ourselves again in F-sharp major, which sounds so marvelous.
IHA: The lack of a true slow movement in the First Sonata is admirably made up for here. Almost continuously the cello sings, across its whole register, but the movement is full, at the same time, of rich song from the piano, right from the opening chords in the rhythm of a funeral march. Moreover, the piano is substantially itself, no mere echo of its partner, as it is, indeed, throughout this tightly woven duo. Somewhat aloof from what just happened, the movement is in F-sharp ("marvelous" indeed), with a middle section in F minor.

Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in Hollywood, Oct. 11, 1966

iii. Allegro passionato

EVH: I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive.
IHA: An exciting scherzo follows, owing its excitement not only to its driving 6/8 meter, again in F minor, but also to passages of cross-rhythm and syncopation. There is a trio in the major before an exact repeat of the whole opening section.

Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Rudolf Serkin, piano. DG, recorded 1982

Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in Hollywood, Oct. 11, 1966

Herre-Jan Stegenga, cello; Philippe Entremont, piano. Brilliant Classics, recorded in the Netherlands, June 28, 2000

iv. Allegro molto

IHA: With a lightening of texture and spirit, the finale comes out fully with echoing between the two instruments. A rondo, it includes an episode of march character and yet another touching and strong-voiced cello song.

Herre-Jan Stegenga, cello; Philippe Entremont, piano. Brilliant Classics, recorded in the Netherlands, June 28, 2000

CONTRASTING COLLABORATIONS, OLD AND NEW

The Piatigorsky-Rubinstein recording of the two Brahms cello sonatas was made in 1966, when Piatigorsky was 63 and clearly past his best, but not released for more than a decade, following the cellist's death in 1976, when Rubinstein inscribed it: "In homage to my dear old and much regretted friend, Gregor Piatigorsky, in memory of our happy and unforgettable collaborations."

As it happens, they had recorded the First Sonata 30 years earlier, and I thought it would be interesting to hear both versions of the first movement of Op. 38. Then I thought we should hear the Rostropovich-Serkin version. By contrast, these two distinguished performers didn't play their instruments together until this collaboration, when Rostropovich was 55 (and mostly a full-time conductor) and Serkin 79. Rostropovich explained in the album notes.

By 1982, even their hair looked pretty much the same.

I heard the name of Rudolf Serkin for the first time in 1956, after my first concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. One critic, among a lot of complimentary remarks about my playing, said that I looked like Rudolf Serkin. Of course, I wanted at once to meet him, but that did not happen until 1960, at the Edinburgh Festival. Since then we have been dear friends, but because of our engagements this recording of the Brahms Sonatas is the first time -- after more than 20 years -- that we have had the chance to play chamber music together. We did perform together in 1977, when I took over as conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington: Serkin was my first solo artist, in Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. I admire the playing of Serkin, who prepared the eminently difficult piano part of the F major Sonata afresh at the age of 79; since I play the piano a little myself, I know what that means!

(For the record, the DG editor added a "[!]" after Rostropovich's "since I play the piano a little myself." I've taken the liberty of taking that out and replacing it with the explanation that MR was in fact an excellent pianist.)

BRAHMS: Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38:
i. Allegro non troppo

IHA: Composed between 1862 and 1865, this was the first duo sonata Brahms published, and it had no successor for a decade and a half, until he relased his First Violin Sonata. The first public performance took place in Leipzig on January 14, 1971, when the work was played by two of the city's leading musicians, Emil Hegar and Carl Reinecke.

The sonata starts with an allegro that is very much non troppo, almost a slow movement, and thus obviating the need for or expectation of a separate movement of that type -- though Brahms had originally drafted one. Slow music, of course, allows the cello to sing, as it does, very fully, the second subject, with oscillating fifths, in B major, being introduced briefly, even curtly. Any sense of imbalance is, however, immediately effaced by the development, which continues seamlessly from this subject to treat it at length before going on to the first theme and so leading straightforwardly into the recapitulation. Here the second subject is brought back in E major, in which key the movement ends.

If the exposition repeat is taken, this movement will occupy around half the works total duration.

Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. EMI, recorded in Paris, July 6, 1936

Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in Hollywood, Oct. 11, 1966

Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Rudolf Serkin, piano. DG, recorded 1982