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Johannes Brahms JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Piano Sonata PIANO SONATA NO.3 FANTASIEN OP.116 KLAVIERSTÜCKE OP.119 Fantasien Op.116 - Klavierstücke Op.119 JON NAKAMATSU

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Johannes Brahms JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Piano Sonata PIANO SONATA NO.3 FANTASIEN OP.116 KLAVIERSTÜCKE OP.119 Fantasien Op.116 - Klavierstücke Op.119 JON NAKAMATSU johannes brahms JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) piano sonata PIANO SONATA NO.3 FANTASIEN OP.116 KLAVIERSTÜCKE OP.119 Fantasien op.116 - Klavierstücke op.119 JON NAKAMATSU This disc presents three of Brahms’s finest piano works. The Fantasias and Klavierstücke, which date from his last years, are also among the best-known. jon Nakamatsu Jon Nakamatsu, Gold Medal Winner at the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, judiciously adds a much earlier work, the Third Sonata written when the composer was twenty. ’ - CD Now HMA 1957339 ‘Nakamatsu is clearly a major talent. Have compositional style and substance ever enjoyed a more intimate marriage than in music by Brahms? Elliptically avoiding conventional stages of artistic growth, Brahms from the first wrote works of an uncommon wisdom and of a maturity that is informed by the ineffable. Nostalgia infuses all of his music, and by the time he reached old age, having composed for more than forty years, this nostalgia had intensified to a compound for which we have no name, a poetic tristesse that amalgamates melancholy, wistfulness, longing, and regret. This essence is Brahms’s alone. That Brahms was different, even difficult, was immediately evident. After the first American performance of the Piano Trio op.8 in 1855, for instance, The New York Times praised its ‘many good points, and much sound musicianship’, yet remarked that the ‘motives . suggest something that had been heard before, and induce a skeptical frame of mind, not altogether just . .’1 For a critic to question his own skepticism is fascinating in itself, and it implies that the ‘something heard before’ was not a theme per se nor a ‘motivo’, but rather, if less definably, an ethos that echoed the past. The past that still sounded in Brahms’s imagination was Beethoven’s world, the apogee of musical Classicism. Brahms, however, would not try to artificially prolong an earlier aesthetic – ‘The process of ossification is a guarantee of respectability’, writes Rosen on the final page of his indispensable study of The Classical Style, and leads to ‘essays in decorum and respect’.2 Rather, he would take basic lessons learned from Beethoven, the composer he most venerated, and make a music of his own. For both composers the piano was the fundamental mode of musical expression. For Beethoven, the thirty-two sonatas trace the trajectory of his enormous career; their changing styles map his musical maturation from student to seer. Likewise for Brahms, his works for piano paint a portrait that is complete. These works begin with the Sonata op.1, whose opening phrase is overtly modeled on the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, op.106; simultaneously they proclaim Brahms’s intellectual allegiance and declare his stylistic independence. And they end with the Piano Pieces of op.119. In the piano medium Brahms found his alpha and omega. As performer, Brahms made a highly favorable impression. The pianist Fanny Davies, a student of Clara Schumann and Britain’s earliest keyboard exponent of Brahms, left a vivid description of his artistry: ‘(Brahms) belonged to that racial [sic] school of playing which begins its phrases well, ends them well, and leaves plenty of space between the end of one and the beginning of another; and yet joins them without any hiatus . .’ ‘Like Beethoven, he was most particular that his marks of expression (always as few as possible) should be the means of conveying the inner musical meaning. The sign < > as used by Brahms often occurs when he wishes to express great sincerity and warmth, applied not only to tone but to rhythm also. He would linger not on one note alone, but on a whole idea, as if unable to tear himself away from its beauty… 1 Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography, A.C. McClurg & Co., p. 40. 2 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style, W.W. Norton, p. 460. 1 Brahms’s manner of interpretation was very free, very elastic and expansive; but the balance was always there – one felt the fundamental rhythms underlying the surface rhythms. His phrasing was notable in lyric passages . When Brahms played one knew exactly what he intended to convey to his listeners: aspirations, wild fantastic flights, majestic calm, deep tenderness without sentimentality, delicate, wayward humor, sincerity, noble passion.’3 As composer, Brahms was equally admired, at least in certain circles. The most johannesinfluential brahms circle was that of Robert Schumann, and when Brahms visited Schumann in 1853 the impact was enormous. Schumann wrote a now-famous article for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in which the younger composer was welcomed as a musical savior. Brahms waspiano extolled as ‘a musician calledsonata to give expression to his times in ideal fashion; a musician who would reveal his mastery not in a gradual evolution, but like Athene would spring fully armed from Zeus’s head . .’.4 Despite this article’s mythic durability, it asks for reevaluation. Deeply enmeshed in the musical politics of the day, Schumann needed a hero to carry his banner – a composer Fantasien op.116whose - artistic Klavierstücke predilections would accord with his own – andop.119 in Brahms he believed he had found one. In retrospect, however, his praise was disproportionate. Brahms, at the time, was becoming known primarily as a pianist. As a composer he still was finding his way; indeed, most of the scores he played for Schumann at their earliest encounter he later destroyed. So what was Schumann up to? One might mention, as Jan Swafford5 does in his jonhelpful biography Nakamatsu of Brahms, that Schumann had anointed prior musical saviors before Brahms, quite literally, would appear on his doorstep; these included such second-tier talents as Ludwig Schunke and William Sterndale Bennett. One also could speculate, with Swafford, on a homoerotic attraction that Schumann might have felt for Brahms. In any case, the title of Schumann’s article, ‘Neue Bahnen’ (New Paths), is itself not free of irony. What drew Schumann to Brahms were not the younger composer’s innovations but his firm adherence to traditions. Though Brahms’s Sonata op.1 might have seemed radically different from other music of the time – its gestures are large and often ungainly, its character defiant, its technical challenges heroic – the work adheres to compositional principles that Brahms found in Beethoven. Schumann would perhaps have been more astute had he called his article ‘Alte Weisen’ (Old ways). Among Brahms’s early piano sonatas – those that are extant – the Sonata op.5 in F minor has proved to be the most durable. Without the overt reference to Beethoven that opens op.1 (a work composed after op.5), Brahms nonetheless writes a large and vigorous five-movement piece that stands squarely in the late Classical tradition. Not for nothing did Schumann and his circle refer to Brahms as ‘a real Beethovener’.6 When Brahms first met Schumann, two movements of this sonata were already completed, the Andante and the Intermezzo (the Rückblick, or Remembrance), and during his sojourn with the Schumanns he composed the remainder. Grandly proportioned, boldly scored, and full of extravagant gestures – Schumann had referred to these early sonatas as ‘veiled symphonies’7 – the work must surely have stunned its first listeners with the flamboyance of its opening gambit. The initial beat of measure one presents the note F; it is played forte and splayed over three octaves of the keyboard’s lower register and, to better prepare the ear for what is to come next, it is given the value of an eighth-note which is followed by an eighth-note rest. Beat two brings a rhythmic and melodic motive that is scored over more than two octaves in the treble; its dotted eighth- and thirty-second notes reaffirm the tonic and with a sense of great propulsion introduce a thematic kernel that leads to beat three, a first-inversion G-minor chord that is held for a quarter-note. Tellingly, this harmonically weak sonority is placed on a rhythmically charged beat, and it leads to the sequential playing out of the six-measure opening phrase. As he crafts this movement, Brahms is endlessly inventive. The motive introduced on the second beat of the opening measure, for example, gets rhythmically elongated in measure five, as the first phrase nears its conclusion. And in the transitional theme heard in measure 23ff., this motive appears again, now expanded over two measures in the right hand and compressed into two beats in the left. Notice, too, the progression of the bass line from the outset: the downward half-tone stepwise motion suggests a passacaglia theme like the one that Brahms would use most eloquently in his Fourth Symphony’s finale. 3 Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performing Style, ed. Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman, Cambridge University Press, p. 303ff. 4 Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, W.W. Norton, p. 252ff. 5 Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, Vintage, p. 86. 6 Swafford, p. 83. 7 Swafford, p. 85. 2 The sonata’s Andante takes its cue from an incipit by the pseudonymous German poet C. O. Sternau, three lines of a love poem which preface the movement. Der Abend dämmert, das Mondlicht scheint, Twilight falls, the moonlight shines, Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint Two hearts are united in love Und halten sich selig umfangen. johannes Andbrahms embrace each other blissfully. Melodically this is pure Brahms, with a theme of exceptionally expressive warmth that, characteristically, falls in thirds. In the development, there is an extended episode in D flat major,piano and notably, this section sharessonata an elegiac sentiment with other sections in the piece that inhabit the same tonality.
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