Brahms 1833–1897

B R A H M S · R Ó Z S A C L A R I N E T S O N A T A S Jean Johnson Steven Osborne Johannes Brahms 1833–1897 Clarinet Sonata No.1 in F minor Op.120 No.1 1 I. Allegro appassionato 8.12 2 II. Andante un poco adagio 5.32 3 III. Allegretto grazioso 4.24 4 IV. Vivace 5.06 Clarinet Sonata No.2 in E flat Op.120 No.2 5 I. Allegro amabile 8.34 6 II. Allegro appassionato – Sostenuto – Tempo I 5.06 7 III. Andante con moto – Allegro 7.16 Miklós Rózsa 1907–1995 Sonatina for solo clarinet Op.27 8 I. Tema con variazioni 5.42 9 II. Vivo e giocoso 3.18 Sonata for solo clarinet Op.41 10 I. Allegro con spirito 4.28 11 II. Andante semplice 4.49 12 III. Allegro capriccioso 4.09 Jean Johnson clarinet Steven Osborne piano Recorded: 8–10 December 2013, Concert Hall, Wyastone Leys, Monmouth Producer: Andrew Keener · Sound engineer: David Hinitt · Editor: Bill Sykes Artist photography: Benjamin Ealovega Design: Jeremy Tilston for WLP Ltd. With thanks to the Strand Gallery, Aldeburgh ൿ & Ꭿ 2014 Jean Johnson and Steven Osborne Marketed by Avie Records www.avie-records.com Romantic affinities: Brahms and Rózsa A significant amount of time had to pass before the reedy chalumeau was transformed into that being that Brahms called ‘Fräulein Klarinette’ – the instrument that inspired him to his final pieces of chamber music. Many ingenious tinkerers worked on this ancient double-reed instrument, whose ‘somewhat caterwauling strains’ offended the ears of the voluble Johann Mattheson and reminded Johann Gottfried Walther of a man trying to sing through clenched teeth. Finally, after countless technical experiments and accretions, they were able to coax from it that inimitable array of sounds that range, in its characteristic registers, from utter melancholy to wry wit, from tenderest flirtation to infernal racket. Between the sparkling virtuosity of the solo clarinet and the background whispers of the ensemble instrument, one aspect in particular strikes the ear and the sensibilities: the tone of autumnal farewell, a glowing display of colours that offer a gentle, plaintive inflection to ‘those who listen secretly’. It is in these precincts that the 35-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the aged Richard Strauss made their last musical utterances, and that the obsessive contrapuntalist Max Reger sang his mellow Op.146 Quintet. These works – not resigned so much as relaxed, as if freed from compulsion – convey much of their composer’s true character for the simple reason that they did not have to exist at all. Johannes Brahms, too, had long since laid down his pen. After writing his Second String Quintet Op.111 (symbolically replicating the magical number of Beethoven’s final piano sonata), he expected nothing more to follow. Then came his well-known and decisive meeting with the young Richard Mühlfeld, his final amour with the above-mentioned ‘Fräulein Klarinette’ and a tetralogy of wonderfully varied late piano pieces, whose depth and beauty are sufficient to exonerate their creator for all the interpersonal faux pas he had committed in the course of a long life through his ‘frightful demeanour’ (to quote his friend Joseph Joachim). In the Clarinet Trio (Op.114), the Clarinet Quintet (Op.115) and perhaps even more so in the two clarinet sonatas (Op.120), this bristly character, whom his declared adversary Max Bruch once wanted to ‘give a punch in his nose’, dropped his guard. Brahms once said that he wrote Op.120 ‘just for fun’. This is no more believable than the mystification that he famously attached to his Second Symphony: ‘The score must be published with a black border’. From early childhood his unusually vulnerable core (‘as pure as diamond, as soft as snow’ were Joachim’s words) was protected by a coat of armour surrounded by a no-man’s-land of impregnable minefields. Those unfamiliar with the paths leading through this labyrinth emerged from it in disarray. Even his most intimate friends had to take care not to kindle emotions in a man for whom the best measuring device was a set of heavy-duty scales. As if to reinforce these thoughts, Brahms’s final two sonatas of 1893 are once again pervaded by a rich web of allusions, suggestions and distant memories, a subdued and often presumably subconscious wealth of relations that no doubt dawned on him only after the work was finished. Is it too much to say that the triadic minims and crotchets which open the Allegro appassionato of the F minor Sonata breathe the same air as the main theme of the Fourth Symphony? And the ghostly piano figuration: doesn’t it seem like the symphony’s doppelgänger? Doesn’t the Allegretto grazioso gather together all his affection for his adopted country, which was, in the end, far kinder to him than ignorant Hamburg? And when Brahms has the clarinet open the Vivace with an irreverent gesture, did he perhaps have in mind a similar motif in the finale of Schubert’s ‘late’ A major Sonata? 3 These traces are admittedly no easier to detect than impurities in smoky amber. At best they are fleeting signals, invariably ensconced in one of those musical forms which the ‘classicist’ Brahms was never one to tamper with – upsurges of feeling articulated in staggered or off-beat phrases; appassionato movements that quietly bid farewell, like the ‘single cry of love’ from Schumann’s great C major Fantasy; and finally, to round off the Second Sonata, a set of variations on an Andante con moto, out of which peers, again and again, the ‘chorale motif’ that Brahms’s close friend and patron Schumann once, ‘softly and simply’, varied with similar accelerandi in the third movement of his Violin Sonata No.2 (Op.121). We may even discern a muffled echo from the Arietta of Beethoven’s portentous Op.111. Then a riotous stretta, riddled with unexpected 3/8 passages in a quick 2/4 tempo, restores the piece to the realm of ‘fun’. Unlike Johannes Brahms, who freely decided to stop composing and just as freely changed his mind, Miklós Rózsa had to wrest his final musical creations from fate with iron discipline. After an almost glamorous yet always earnest life that earned him great fame and high honours in decades of service to the film industry (including a dozen Oscar nominations, three Oscars and a Golden Globe), he suffered a severe stroke in September 1982 at the age of 75, leaving him paralysed on his left side until his death on 27 July 1995. Having completed the score to the delightful Philip Marlowe parody Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, he had to admit that he could no longer continue as before. But the creative urge within him was still strong. A Hungarian composer who had begun to take violin lessons in early childhood, and who later studied composition at the Leipzig Conservatory with Hermann Grabner (a Reger pupil), Rózsa overcame his considerable handicap to create, between 1983 and 1989, seven surprisingly large-scale solo works for, respectively, flute, violin, clarinet, guitar, oboe, viola and ondes martenot. These works, numbered Opp. 39 to 45, mark the end of a long list of ‘serious’ compositions, beginning in 1927 with the Trio-Serenade (Op.1) and continuing alongside his ‘main line of business’ like a clearly audible counter-melody. Now this melody was all that was left to him, and it had to be pared down to a single line (except in the case of the guitar with its chordal possibilities). The elderly Paul Klee committed his ‘monophonic’ angels to paper in the same way, and Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten similarly cut back their resources in their old age. But Rózsa still produced lively sparks, as in the three-movement Clarinet Sonata (Op.41), premiered in New York by Gervase de Peyer in 1987. Its impulses are spread over broad expanses from which typically Hungarian snippets pop up time and again – the same snippets found 30 years earlier in his Op.27 Sonatina, with its expansive set of variations and its droll Vivo e giocoso finale, the solo sonata’s direct predecessor. Here there is no trace of farewell, but at most a quiet longing for home, as in the central Andante semplice, where the tárogató – the Hungarian folk clarinet, with its slightly mournful and somewhat saxophonesque tinge – sings across vast distances … Eckhardt van den Hoogen Translation: Richard Evidon 4 Romantische Wahlverwandtschaft: Brahms and Rózsa Es musste eine gehörige Zeit vergehen, bis aus dem rohrblättrigen Chalumeau das „Fräulein Klarinette“ wurde, das Johannes Brahms zu seinen allerletzten Kammermusiken anregen sollte. Viele findige Tüftler arbeiteten daran, diesem alten Schalmeieninstrument, an dessen „etwas heulende[r] Symphonie“ sich der wortgewaltige Johann Mattheson stieß und in dessen Klang Johann Gottfried Walther einen Menschen durch die Zähne glaubte singen zu hören, vermöge unzähliger technischer Experimente und Beigaben endlich jenes unverwechselbare Tonspektrum abzugewinnen, das in seinen charakteristischen Registern der größten Melancholie und dem kessen Witz, der innigsten Liebelei und dem drastischsten Höllenlärm fähig ist. Zwischen der perlenden Virtuosität der solistischen und der flüsternden Grundierung der ensemblemäßig verwandten Klarinette fällt eine Seinsweise besonders ins Ohr und Gemüt: der Aspekt des herbstlichen Abschieds, durch dessen leuchtende Farbenpracht „für den, der heimlich lauscht“, ein leiser Ton der Wehmut gezogen kommt. In diesen Regionen spielen die letzten Worte des 35-jährigen Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart und des greisen Richard Strauss, da singt der obsessive Kontrapunktiker Max Reger sein verklärtes Quintett op. 146 – nicht resignierend, sondern entspannt, beinahe wie erlöst von unerklärlichen Zwängen sind diese Werke, aus denen uns so viel „Eigentliches“ und „Wesentliches“ entgegentritt, weil sie nicht mehr sein müssen.

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