Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, op. 15 (1858)
Johannes Brahms (Yo-hah-nez Brahmz)
Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna, Austria

Brahms composed the First Piano Concerto between 1854 and 1858. Joseph Joachim conducted the first performance in Hanover on January 22, 1859, with the composer as soloist.

"My concerto has been a brilliant and decisive--failure... the first and second movements were listened to without the slightest display of feeling. At the conclusion, three pairs of hands were brought together very slowly, whereupon a perfectly distinct hissing from all sides stifled any such demonstration. This failure has not impressed me at all. After all, I am only experimenting and feeling my way. All the same, the hissing was rather too much..."

So wrote twenty-six-year-old Johannes Brahms in 1859 after the second performance of his D minor Piano Concerto in Leipzig. Six years earlier Robert Schumann had written an article for the New Journal of Music that made Brahms the talk of musical Europe. Schumann announced that Beethoven's successor had appeared: "... like Athena, springing fully armed from the head of Zeus. He has come, a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes stood guard. His name is Johannes Brahms..." Schumann and his pianist wife, Clara, had recognized the genius burning in Johannes, taken him into their hearts and set his career in motion. Suddenly thrust into the public eye, Brahms felt he had something to prove and decided to compose a symphony. He wrote to the Schumanns in 1854: "I have been trying my hand at a symphony during the past summer and have even orchestrated the first movement and sketched the second and third." But the next month, Robert, plagued for decades by manic-depressive episodes, suffered a complete mental breakdown, threw himself into the Rhine River and was confined to an asylum for the remaining two years of his life.

Brahms, who cherished a lifelong affection for Clara, attempted to ease her plight by moving into the Schumann's home and taking care of her and her children. He continued to work on the symphony, painting a musical portrait of Clara in the slow movement. His friend Julius Grimm helped him with the orchestration, but Brahms was dissatisfied with the work. He felt he didn't have the mastery yet to succeed in a form that Beethoven had developed to such perfection. He rewrote the unfinished symphony as a sonata for two pianos. He and Clara played it together often during the painful months of Robert's slow descent into final darkness. Still dissatisfied, Brahms decided not to publish this work. It seemed too big, too orchestral in scope for the sonority of two pianos. Finally Julius Grimm suggested he merge the two versions and transform the work into a piano concerto.

So the sonata's first and second movements became the Maestoso and Adagio of the D minor Piano Concerto. Brahms shelved the dark-hued third movement (it eventually became part of his German Requiem as the chorus "Behold All Flesh") and wrote a more lighthearted gypsy-flavored finale. This was the work that was given such a lukewarm--nay, hostile--reception when Brahms first performed it in Hanover and Leipzig. A critic called it "a symphony with piano accompaniment in which the solo part is as ungrateful as possible and the orchestral part a series of lacerating chords." Brahms continued to tinker with the concerto and it eventually became popular with audiences, although less so than his Second Concerto. It is the work of a bold, passionate young man whose inexperience writing large musical forms and occasional awkwardness in orchestration kept him from reaching the Olympian heights for which he was aiming. Burnett James writes: "The D minor Concerto... marks the end of Brahms' youthful romantic period. Never again was he to let himself go with such uninhibited passion; never again to wear his heart so unashamedly on his sleeve; never to let his guard down so that all the turbulence of his heart and mind would appear in his music. If the impetuous side of his nature ever had the chance to take command of him, its last full fling was in the D minor Concerto."

The romantic turbulence of Brahms' young spirit bursts forth immediately in the massive opening theme that the strings hurl out like a thunderbolt over a stormy timpani roll. The storm subsides momentarily as a darkly melancholy second theme sings above wave-like rocking figures in the lower strings, then thunder from the timpani sparks the return of the tempest. This serves to introduce the solo piano which repeats the exposition of the previous themes, then puts forth a warmly expansive melody that rises to a romantic climax. The vast scale of this movement (it's over twenty minutes long) encompasses a wide array of moods from thundering passion to light-footed gaiety. It ends with a brilliant, no-holds barred coda that surges to a fiery climax. Brahms wrote the inscription Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domine ("Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord") on the manuscript score of the Adagio second movement. This seems to have been a dedication to both Robert and Clara Schumann. Brahms often addressed the older Robert as "Mynheer Domine," and he wrote a letter to Clara in 1856 telling her "I am painting a lovely portrait of you. It is to be the Adagio." The gentle, pensive lyricism of this movement is indeed a moving portrait of a woman who may have been the only truly romantic love of the reticent composer's life. The finale is a rousing, big-boned Hungarian/Gypsy-style rondo that encompasses two cadenzas, a warm, singing second theme and a sprightly, decidedly non-academic fughetta. It is an exuberant conclusion to this hot-blooded creation of a budding young genius.

Third Symphony (1946)
Aaron Copland
Born November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York
Died December 2, 1990 in Peekskill, New York

"I must say it's a wonderful work. Coming to know it so much better, I find in it new lights and shades--and new faults. Sweetie, the end is a sin. You've got to change. Stop the presses! We must talk--about the whole last movement, in fact. I must confess I have made a sizable cut near the end, and believe me it makes a whale of a difference. By the way, I do it awfully well..."-- Leonard Bernstein, in a letter to Aaron Copland after conducting the Third Symphony in Prague in 1947.

If any composer can be said to have developed a unique and unmistakable personal musical "thumbprint" or style it was Aaron Copland. The ballet scores he wrote in the 1930s and 40s with their wide-open, spacious "American" sonorities of open seconds, fourths, fifths and triads and their simple, folksong-like melodies became almost instant musical cliches.

In fact, that musical language and syntax had been painstakingly developed by Copland in a conscious effort to make his music attractive to a wider audience. He wrote: "It seemed to me that composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. An entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and continue writing as though they did not exist. I felt it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms." This effort culminated in Appalachian Spring and the Third Symphony. If there are portions of the Third Symphony that remind us of Appalachian Spring, this is understandable, since Copland began working on the Symphony almost immediately after the completion of the ballet score in 1944.

This was to be Copland's most extended and ambitious orchestral composition, and he was determined to make it a major musical statement. He also wanted the work to reflect his sense of elation over the Allied victory over totalitarianism that was taking place as the Symphony was being written, and his sense of optimism about the postwar world. It was a time for music of affirmation and hope, and Copland found the germinating inspiration for the melodic and harmonic structure of the Symphony in a short piece he had composed for the Cincinnati Symphony in 1942 as a morale-booster for the war effort. Among the ten new fanfares by ten American composers played that year in Cincinnati was Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. This has become one of his best-known works, and its familiar rising and falling sequences of thirds, fourths and fifths provided Copland with the basic vocabulary for most of the themes in the Third Symphony. The Fanfare itself appears in its original form in the introduction to the fourth movement of the Symphony.

The opening movement is broad and expressive in character, beginning quietly with a simple melody for flute, clarinets and violins. The movement grows more agitated and arches to a climax in which an emphatic quote from the Fanfare is heard in the French horns before returning to the hushed mood and coloring of the opening.

The second movement opens with the same melodic germ from the Fanfare that we just heard in the first movement, again played by the French horns. This movement is a brilliant, somewhat sarcastic scherzo which features some extremely strenuous and demanding writing for the brass section, especially the trumpets and horns, who are screaming away in the very top register of their instruments for much of the movement. There is, fortunately, some respite given during the Trio section for the brass players to let their embouchures cool off. Here the oboe is given a lyrical theme that would not be out of place in the middle of Appalachian Spring, and the strings join in for a bit of a waltz, but then the brass section is hard at it again as the scherzo returns and the movement ends with a fine, noisy explosion of sound that features doubled rim-shots for the snare drums.

The third movement begins gently and quietly, and is the freest of all in formal structure. In Copland's words: "The various sections are intended to emerge one from the other in a continuous flow, somewhat in the manner of a close-knit series of variations. Some of the writing in the third movement is for very high strings and piccolo, with no brass except a single horn and trumpet. It leads directly into the final and longest of the movements."

This final movement begins with a softly sung harmonization of phrases from the Fanfare in the woodwinds. The timpani and lower strings shift the harmony suddenly over to C major and we hear the original Fanfare played now in its entirety. The woodwinds follow this with an improvisatory passage that begins to bustle with sixteenth-notes and turns into a joyous dance that is as delicate and sparkling as the Fanfare was weighty and grand.

The rest of the movement is a virtuoso show-piece for the entire orchestra, full of energetic, jazzy rhythms and death-defying leaps, demanding light-fingered dexterity from the violins in particular, not to mention the piccolo player, who probably has more devilishly tricky and exposed solos to play in this one symphony than in the entire remainder of the season. At the climax, Copland brings back the Fanfare theme in the woodwinds and horn, beginning with (yet another) plucky solo for the piccolo, which is allowed to grow gradually into a majestic restatement of the Fanfare in the full orchestra. The final summation combines the opening theme of the first movement with the Fanfare theme in a ringing affirmation that brings the symphony to a close that is appropriately grand and stirring.

Program notes Copyright © 2008 by Matthew Naughtin