Ignat Solzhenitsyn - Solzhenitsyn Plays Brahms

FROM OPUS 4 TO OPUS 118 This disc of the piano music of Johannes Brahms joins three rarely heard early works with the famous late pieces of Op. 118. Critical discussion of the remarkable Scherzo, Op. 4, has tended to focus on what it is not-a masterpiece of mature lyricism, say-rather than what it is: a first effort of the highest order, a bursting onto the musical scene of a formidable new force of utter originality. Here was a genius who, in Schumann's famous words, "would not gain his mastery by gradual stages, but rather would spring fully armed like Athena from the head of Zeus". Our perception of the Scherzo's shocking power is further enhanced by the knowledge that these are the earliest un-destroyed pages of Brahms' work. From the very first jolt of it's neurotic four-note main motif, it seems primed to explode. The stops and starts of this first theme combine with a startling tonal ambiguity to create a sense of foreboding that is paradoxically relieved when the doleful horn-like second theme (heard in the left hand against obsessively repeated "raindrops" in the right) establishes at last the home key of E-flat minor (itself a significant and daring choice). After recapitulating the main theme, Brahms brings back the second one, but ushered in this time by a terrifying cascade of fortissimo scales hurtling down toward the abyss. Stripped of all ornament, this theme is now revealed as a ghastly skeleton, a danse macabre full of rage and despair. Then comes a trio section of playful whimsy, but whose sophisticated, ever-shifting meter and complex polyphonic interweaving betray an underlying seriousness of purpose. Then the scherzo is fully recapitulated, and all seems finished. But there follows a surprise to take our breath away: a new pulsating theme of rich texture, clothed in the noble raiments of B major. And so we begin to grasp the vastness of the design: a full-fledged "double scherzo" with two distinct trios. This second trio pays tribute both to Liszt, in it's heroic bravura, and to Chopin, in it's sweeping lyricism. Having fully exhausted itself, the trio winds down around it's home key of B before unnoticeably slipping a half-step to B-flat, and by that route to a final restatement of the main scherzo itself. This time the dam gives way, and the wild momentum of the dance of rage is at last given free rein through a cathartic accelerando that leads us to the dizzying hammer blows of the coda. The Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann in F-sharp minor, Op. 9 contain some of the most poignant and bewitching writing ever to emerge from Brahms' pen. Composed during the tense weeks after Schumann's suicide attempt, they are suffused with tender affection for the convalescing Robert and for his wife, Clara, who had just delivered their seventh child. But this work is equally striking for it's utter command of variation form, almost frightening in a 21-year-old who had barely tried his hand in this treacherous genre. The theme itself (from Schumann's Bunte Blätter of 1841) is a thing of great beauty, a group of three lilting eight-bar phrases, set in prayerful four-part harmony reminiscent of a Bach chorale. Brahms then takes this magnificent material and, while taking great care to preserve it's harmonic rhythm and ternary phrase structure, proceeds to transform it through a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of devices: In Var. 1 the theme is placed in the bass, while a subsidiary line from Schumann's alto voice emerges in the treble. Var. 2, in severe diminution, presents a wistful 9/8 siciliana underneath a new right-hand chorale that can never seem to quite keep harmonic pace. In the middle of Var. 3 the theme slithers a half step down to F minor, only to recover just as unexpectedly and finish in the home key. Var. 4 proffers an entirely fresh texture: the theme soaring in the treble above gently undulating waves of sixteenths. These come to the forefront starkly in Var. 5, a whimsical and capricious study in the Lisztian mould. Var. 6 is a virtuoso tour de force of onrushing sextuplets set against an angular syncopated bass. Serving as a postlude to this opening group of variations, the starkly condensed Var. 7 is a delicate rumination upon the chromatic implications of Schumann's theme, an aspect hardly obvious at first blush but gradually uncovered by Brahms through the course of the first six variations. The middle group of variations begins, at Var. 8, with the mournful strumming of the theme in the treble, shadowed, in canon at the octave, by the crepuscular quivering of the bass. A 30-second mirage, Var. 9 (in B minor), is a dazzling homage to Schumann, recalling the most spectral passages of the Davidsbündlertänze or Kreisleriana. Var. 10, in radiant D major, is the emotional centerpiece, blending a new rendering of the theme with it's inversion at the third, all filtered through no fewer than four distinct textures. In Var. 11 Brahms performs the stupefying feat of firmly establishing the Neapolitan key of G major without ever once-not once!-mentioning it explicitly. Var. 12 salutes the return of F-sharp minor with another character study whose playful brilliance and death-defying leaps recall the finest of Liszt's daredevilry. Var. 13, flitting by seemingly at the speed of light, demands expert care in navigating it's chromatic thirds and sixths. In the final trio of variations, Brahms summons all his creative powers in a thrilling ascent to a contemplative summit rarely matched since, and probably never surpassed. First, in Var. 14, he embarks on another canon, this time at the second. This choice of the most perilous of all canons allows Brahms, far beyond just demonstrating his polyphonic prowess, to bring into focus the aching Baroque suspensions that, it now emerges clearly, lie at the heart of the pathos of Schumann's theme: We may perceive this as music of limitless regret. Var. 15 is yet another canon (at the sixth), bathed in the soothing tenebrous hues of G-flat (the enharmonic tonic major). This we may hear as music of consolation. And, at last, Var. 16, with it's mesmerizing bass theme echoed by syncopated suspensions in the treble, may be experienced as music of ultimate acceptance and forgiveness. The Four Ballades, Op. 10 were written just months after the Variations, and share with them an overall feeling of profound, pointed introspection, and, at times, almost unbearable poignancy. Shaped by an intensely personal inner logic, they eschew any brilliant effect, and such few explosions as do occur fade away inexorably. Unlike the ballades of Chopin or Liszt, these pieces are intimately intertwined and clearly designed to be experienced as a whole. In fact, as Malcolm MacDonald has suggested, it is hardly a stretch to descry a broad sonata-like scheme in these four movements (although each individual movement is more or less in ternary form). Another strong indication of the organic unity of this set is it's conspicuously constricted tonal landscape, almost exclusively in the variants of D and B. (A closer look reveals a truly obsessive concentration: 1. D minor-D major-D minor. 2. D major-B minor-B major-B minor-B major-D major. 3. B minor-D# minor-B minor-B major. 4. B major-D# minor-B major-B minor.) The first Ballade is inspired by the hair-raising Scottish ballad "Edward", about a son who murders his father and curses his mother. (Brahms made an actual setting of that text later in his Balladen und Romanzen, Op. 75.) The outer sections resemble nothing so much as a funeral march, with their starkly spaced harmonies and medieval-sounding direct fifths and octaves. The second Ballade contrasts the spellbinding narrative of it's outer sections with the dry machine-like ostinato of the middle, and is capped off by a masterful dream-like coda. The next Ballade begins with an air of defiance, but an immobile, wondrously fleshless B section, followed by a deeply unsettling pianissimo restatement of the main materia