On Wednesday afternoon I went to Paul Hall to hear a one-hour recital given by Juilliard's Piano Performance Forum. The program featured only two works, one each by Rachmaninoff and Brahms.
The recital began with a performance by Chaeyoung Park of Rachmaninoff's Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 36 (1913, rev. 1931). When listening to Rachmaninoff's music, one can't help feeling that he belonged to another era. Living in exile in Los Angeles, he was an aristocrat with far less connection to twentieth century America than to Czarist Russia, the last traces of which had long since disappeared. In an age dominated by modernism, even though he was only a year older than Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff clung unapologetically throughout his career to the nineteenth century Romanticism of his mentor Tchaikovsky. It was Rachmaninoff's genuine devotion to this tradition that makes his music so appealing and refutes those critics who would consider him nothing more than an anachronism. As Rachmaninoff himself put it, a composer's music should reflect "the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves." And Rachmaninoff was as good as his word. In his music Romanticism is still the vital force it had been in the previous century, and nowhere more so than in the present sonata. The listener has only to hear the dramatic opening of the first movement to know where the composer's heart lies. Still another Romantic element is the use of bells throughout the work - Rachmaninoff composed the sonata at the same time as The Bells, Op. 35 - and most noticeably in its closing bars.
The sonata exists in at least three versions. While the original 1913 version was well received at its premiere, Rachmaninoff decided to make changes. It may have been that he still lacked confidence in his own judgment after the disastrous premiere years before of his Symphony No. 1, but in any event he "streamlined" the sonata by removing many of the more difficult passages and in so doing shortened it by about five minutes. Then in 1940 Vladimir Horowitz, with the composer's permission, prepared a third version that incorporated elements of both the 1913 and the 1931. I have a recording of Horowitz performing this version, and to my mind it's the most satisfactory. Judging solely by the length of the performance, that played at Wednesday's recital was the 1931.
The second and final work, performed by Sylvia Jiang, was Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24 (1861). One does not usually associate Brahms with Baroque music, but the nineteenth century composer actually made a deep study of earlier musical forms in order to improve his own compositions. The Op. 24 is the finest product of his research and he himself regarded it as such at the time of its composition. Starting from a simple theme from Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-flat major, HWV 434, Brahms concentrated on the bass line in order to find within it new melodies not previously expressed rather than simply composing variations on the melodies already written out by Handel. In this way, the variations can actually be viewed as original pieces authored by Brahms himself that nevertheless remain absolutely faithful to their source. Not only was Brahms seeking inspiration in a work from the Baroque era, but the musical forms he employed in his variations - such as a siciliana and a canon, not to mention the fugue - also derived from that same period. The irony was that the very concept of a theme and variations, so central to Beethoven's oeuvre, was by the mid-nineteenth century itself considered an outdated form. Few composers other than Brahms were working in that genre. It may have been the composer's veneration for Beethoven that caused Brahms to turn it in the first place. At any rate, he gave it new life, both here and even more famously in his later Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
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