Johannes Brahms turns 190

Brahms at the piano

In wishing to salute Johannes Brahms, on his birthday or on any day, no words could ever match the mysterious and awe-inducing tribute of the soothsayer Schumann. I quote some of it below, with grateful appreciation for his noble attempt to articulate the ineffable phenomenon of Brahms.

“Someone would and must appear, fated to give us the ideal expression of the times, one who would not gain his mastery by gradual stages, but rather would spring fully armed like Minerva from the head of Kronion. And he has come, a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes mounted guard. His name is Johannes Brahms, from Hamburg, where he has been creating in obscure silence… He carries all the marks of one who has received a call.”

— Robert Schumann, 28 October 1853

Ludwig Thunders Home

I’ve been asked to give a lecture on any Beethoven topic during my appearance at the Lake Champlain festival in August, and I’ve decided to talk about recapitulation in the Master’s sonata forms—in particular examining how and why he arrives home, much more often than not, in thunderous fortissimo. Just as a nice symmetrical example, here is what that looks like in his first and last symphonies:

Numbering Schubert's Symphonies

Some months ago I received an unusual query from an orchestra librarian, in preparation for upcoming performance: to confirm which Schubert symphony I would be conducting with her orchestra, the 9th, 7th, or 8th?

It reminded me of how absurdly convoluted the numbering of Schubert’s symphonies continues to be, varying from publisher to publisher and country to country.

The symphony in question—the C major, D 944—was originally known as the 9th (since a “7th” symphony in E major, D 729 was left unfinished, as was its famous successor, the “8th” in B minor, D 759). But Brahms, as editor of the original Schubert Gesamtausgabe, omitted any number for D 729 and reversed the order of the other two, with D 944 designated as “7” and D 759 as “8”. Later, in 1908, Grove’s labeled D 944 as “10”, although in our day and age its numbering has pretty well reverted to “9”. Except in Germany, where it is known as “8”. Got all that?

I ended up just sending the librarian a scan of the first page of my score…

The Answer to All Your Questions is…

“TV wizard Don Ohlmeyer, a far smarter man than I, once told me, “The answer to all your questions is: Money.””

— Tony Kornheiser, Washington Post

Despite the moral dubiousness of the worldview expressed in that quote, it does have the virtue of edging dispiritingly close to the way things actually are, in all probability.

Well, in music, a field where we love to talk about feelings and moods and intangibles, an approximate analogy may hold true: The Answer to All Your Questions Is: Physics.

In rehearsing an orchestra, or teaching a conducting student, or a piano student, I often ask, Why? Why are you doing it like that? (I.e., why are you phrasing it in such a seemingly unnatural way? why are you making a “bump” in the line? why are you stressing a weak beat and glossing over the stronger beat? etc.) Usually, the “guilty party” replies, “I don’t know why… it’s just how I do it.”

But I know why, or at least I think I do. 99 times out of 100, it’s not because the person is somehow unmusical, or thoughtless, or unorganized, but because physics are getting in his way: he is running out of breath (winds), or fudging a troublesome string-crossing (strings), or placing the thumb on a black key in a scale passage (piano). The lack of thought is not about music, it’s about the body, about how to execute a musical passage with the imperfect anatomy given us by God and nature.

““You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.””

— Leon Trotsky

This is why I like to remind students, paraphrasing the horrid Trotsky, that “you may not be interested in technique, but technique is interested in you”. The moment we cross from simply contemplating music to the craft of playing it, we have no choice but to confront—and conform to, and align with, and master—the physical obstacles that inhibit us from playing music in that perfect, ideal way that we hear in our heads.

Ready for Rachmaninoff

I’d been asked several times over the years to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9, but never felt it was a piece I wanted to play. Sometimes that kind of feeling never changes, but in this case, on track with my ever-increasing appreciation and re-thinking of Rachmaninoff, when asked by Salt Bay Chamberfest Music Director (and dear friend) Wilhelmina Smith, I felt ready and jumped at the chance.

What an experience it has been to study this collosal work, and to attempt to reconcile its inner workings and contradictions. Here below is the first movement from last week’s performance at Salt Bay, with fabulous colleagues Sean Lee and Yeesun Kim. (The complete audio is here.) How moody, this funereal opening in the piano, and how poignantly mournful the string theme that grows above it.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn · Rachmaninoff Piano Trio No. 2 | I. Moderato

The Tangled Path of Composers' Revisions

One of the key “secrets” of the Marlboro Festival experience is the time one has here to study, practice, and rehearse in a way that is not possible at other times and places.

Over the last few weeks, in preparing for rehearsals with colleagues here on a “standard” piece I’ve performed several times over the years—Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, No. 3—I became frustrated, for the nth time, with the ambiguous or insufficient markings left to us from the original editions (the autograph being lost). There are so many questions, and no way to know what Beethoven was thinking, or why there exist so many unresolved ambiguities.

No way to know… except that, a quarter of a century later, Beethoven returned to this work, re-imagining it as a string quintet, published in 1819 as Op. 104. What is remarkable about this transcription—apart from its inherent richness and freedom—is how carefully the Master hews to his model while never missing an opportunity to clarify, re-think, flesh out details of phrasing, dynamics, and articulation.

Let me share an instructive example right on the first page. Consider the thrilling phrase that begins in Bar 19—is it piano? is it forte? are the sforzandi in the piano and violin parts “static”, or do they indicate growth? what is that lone, long hairpin doing in the cello part, and is it only there because, even on Beethoven’s instruments, the cello was disadvantaged and needs to grow here to be heard in good balance?…

All very problematic and open-ended and more questions are raised than answered… but now look at the quintet version:

At the beginning of the phrase, in Bar 19, all instruments are clearly marked piano. There is a general crescendo that begins in 21, marked in every part and with Beethoven’s patented continuation marks to boot, themselves leading in the clearest way to a general forte in 25.

What a relief to understand exactly how Beethoven wants this phrase to go. But the follow-up question immediately arises: does this revision/reimagination trump the original version? or should they be treated as separate entities, allowing that Beethoven simply saw things differently all those years later?

For me, the best answer is to decide on a case-by-case basis: where something truly different seems to be intended, vive la différence and let each stand on its own; but where—as here—a later revision is obviously intended to clarify/refine notation that was ambiguous or sloppy in the first place, by all means learn from the later improvement and import it back into the original, in the reverent hope that LvB would heartily approve.

On Mendelssohn, Dostoevsky, and Suffering

After a recent lecture at Benedictine College, I was asked an intriguing question about the connection between suffering and art—is there a correlation?

See the full event here.

Don Carlo(s?)

Very, very, very interesting to hear the French version of Don Carlo at the Met recently. So different from what one is used to, and yet, of course, so similar. The proverbial “long-lost twin”?… Bravo to Yannick and all our colleagues in this magisterial “true ensemble” opera.

Here is one passage (the entrance of the Grand Inquisitor) that sounds equally captivating and unnerving in any language:

Tracking Michelangelo’s text

Think of the elaborate journey of Michelangelo’s texts, from conception to being heard in a Shostakovich setting centuries later (the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145). To adequately represent that journey, and to help the listener follow along intelligently, I created, with invaluable help from Marlboro’s head librarian Koji Otsuki and the baritone Simon Barrad, the below PDF, which tracks the text through four crucial iterations.

First comes the original Italian—Michelangelo’s own “Rime”. Next—the inspired Russian translation of them by the poet Abram Efros. These Efros texts are the ones Shostakovich actually sets in his great Op. 145 suite. Third, we’ve placed my transliteration of the Russian into phonetic English, so the non-Russian-reading listener may always know where exactly we are in the work. And finally comes Simon Barrad’s excellent translation of the Russian into English, to give an English-speaking listener the closest possible sense of the text that governs and shapes Shostakovich’s masterwork.

Shostakovich's Last Word

As he lay dying in August 1975, Shostakovich completed his final work, a deeply personal summation of his entire creative life (obliquely referencing each of this fifteen symphonies)—the Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147. I will be playing this, one of my very favorite Shostakovich works, several times this season with both Timothy Ridoud in the UK and Hsin-Yun Huang in the US. Below is a live performance of the 2nd movement for WQXR here in New York.

Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Ignat Solzhenitsyn, piano, play the second movement of Shostakovich's Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147, in the WQXR studio.