When I first read that Emanuel Ax’s recital in Chicago this afternoon was part of “The Brahms Project,” I assumed this was a title chosen by marketing consultants to make the concerts seem bold and edgy. It’s certainly snappier than calling the series “Another Excuse to Program Some Brahms.” However, this was unfair. In fact, Ax had commissioned two contemporary composers to produce piano pieces inspired by Brahms F-A-F (Frei Aber Froh) motto. Perhaps Missy Mazzoli was traumatized as a child practicing Brahms G-minor Rhapsody, because her contribution, Bolts of Loving Thunder, tormented Ax with relentless hand-crossings that mimicked the rhapsody’s treacherous opening bars. Ax confessed that the piece would be impossible to play if he gained any more weight. To my untrained ear, the music had an attractive, if not too challenging, harmonic palette, a bit reminiscent of John Adams, with whom she shares a post-minimalist use of repeated phrases to generate tension and resolution.
The other music, Hommage à Brahms, by Brett Dean was a set of three more overtly contemporary interludes that were designed to be played between the four pieces that make up Brahms op. 119. I’m not sure that they can really be said to have illuminated Brahms’ music, which still seemed reassuringly familiar whenever normal service was resumed. I once wrote how Paul Lewis started playing Mozart’s A-minor Rondo without pause after some Ligeti, giving the eighteenth century chromaticism a jolt of modernity. Here, it was more as if the new music helped to cleanse the palette between courses of Brahms rather cozy romanticism, rather than show it in a new light. The third piece was a particularly haunting example of night music, a quiet reflection before the bombast of the final Brahms Rhapsody.
There was nothing cozy about the opening piece, Brahms’ Piano Sonata no. 2 in F-sharp minor. Ax says he chose it because he had never heard it performed live. I had heard Krystian Zimerman play all three Brahms sonatas in his London debut, following his Chopin competition triumph, but it is true that only the third is played regularly. The second was written when Brahms was only 19, and shows the raw energy and undisciplined inventiveness of youth. The first movement in particular is a riot of defiant octaves and jagged rhythms while the second has the spectral quality of an eerie ghost story. In fact, the whole sonata has a touch of the mephistophelean about it, concluding with a devilishly comic burlesque, perhaps the closest Brahms ever came to Berlioz or Liszt. The performance was completely assured, arguably too assured for such wild unruly music.
The final piece was Brahms Variations on a Theme of Handel. This year, we have had performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. The Brahms set completes a remarkable trilogy, although it doesn’t have quite the same epic stature as its predecessors. This is partly a matter of length – at under thirty minutes, it is under half the length of the other two – but it also lacks their ambition, the sense that all musical expression is being explored. For example, instead of the moving adagios that precede the final variations in the earlier works, Brahms gives us a musical box variation (which is enchanting but hardly profound). Nevertheless, it’s wonderful music that is expertly crafted and full of beautiful things.
It is a piece that Emanuel Ax loves. He can produce the most lovely cantabile tone, with fluid phrasing and effortless textural balance. He was extremely effective in concealing any awkwardness in the piano writing – variations that can seem clumsy in less expert hands were unfailingly lithe and fluent, and he has a flawless instinct for pacing the music so that it never flags. The final fugue was especialy powerful because it was so measured. I once heard Barenboim ruin a fine performance with a headlong rush into the final page, but Ax is too poised to make a mistake like that. My only complaint is that for all his tonal beauty, Ax rarely conveys the intense intimacy that some pianists do, the sense that we are sharing something intensely personal and private.
After the concert, I asked Ax if he felt that the seventies, a decade in which Murray Perahia, Krystian Zimerman, and Ax himself came to prominence, was a golden age of pianism. He is disarmingly modest and refused the compliment. He thought the new generation of pianists emerging today were even finer, capable of doing anything, but needed, as he did, a certain amount of luck to have successful careers. He was looking forward to retirement from such intense competition, a sentiment that was not shared by his many affectionate admirers in the audience.
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