Program Notes: Hilary Hahn Plays Brahms

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Tragic Overture, Opus 81
BORN: May 7, 1833, in Hamburg
DIED: April 3, 1897, in Vienna
WORK COMPOSED: 1880
WORLD PREMIERE: December 26, 1880, in Vienna, under the direction of Hans Richter.

What to Listen For:

• Although we do not know what, specifically, its title alludes to, the music of Tragic Overture evokes a general sense of sorrowful drama.

• The opening chords establish the stern character that prevails for most of the piece.

The first half of tonight’s concert presents a pair of works by Johannes Brahms. Together, they reveal both the severe and the warmly humane aspects of his character.

Brahms’s two concert overtures evoke Janus, the two-headed Roman god of comedy and tragedy. Remarkably, the composer wrote both works during the summer of 1880. The first, his Academic Festival Overture, is the only major piece in the composer’s output that can properly be called light-hearted. As if to compensate for its uncharacteristic levity, Brahms immediately set to work on a far more serious composition that he titled simply Tragic Overture.

Brahms’s extreme reticence about his creative process has prevented us from knowing whether he composed this music with a specific idea or dramatic scenario in mind. A proposal to mount a production of Goethe’s Faust in Vienna may have provided the impetus for its creation. Max Kalbeck, Brahms’s first biographer, asserts that the composer had expressed enthusiasm for the idea of providing music for that presentation. (Unfortunately, the play proved too difficult to stage and was abandoned.) But sketches discovered after the Brahms’s death indicate that he conceived much of the music some 10 or 12 years before he finally composed the overture, and that initially, he may have intended its music for a symphony. In view of this, it is more reasonable to hear the work as an expression of tragedy in an abstract sense rather than as a response to any particular literary stimulus.

The Tragic Overture opens with a pair of shattering chords, a terse hammerblow gesture that recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. From this initial figure flows a broad theme rising in the strings. That subject expands powerfully and leads to two others: a march-like figure that grows out of the opening theme, and a tender melody whose inherent warmth transcends the restraint with which Brahms treats it. (It is this theme and its extension that the composer had sketched in the late 1860s.) The development of these ideas yields music whose form and dramatic character are in every way symphonic.

JOHANNES BRAHMS 
Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 77
WORK COMPOSED: 1878
WORLD PREMIERE: January 1, 1879, in Leipzig; the composer conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with guest soloist Joseph Joachim.

What to Listen For:

• The melody introduced by the solo violin in the first movement and the main theme of the second are among the most lyrical ideas in all of Brahms’s output.

• The finale brings evocations of Hungarian gypsy violin playing.

Brahms enjoyed close relationships with numerous highly accomplished musicians. Chief among them were Clara Schumann, widow of composer Robert Schumann and one of the great pianists of the 19th century; and Joseph Joachim, a superb violinist and Brahms’s oldest friend.

Joachim was an extraordinary musician by any standard. A virtuoso of the first rank, he nevertheless disdained the showy pyrotechnics of such famous 19th-century violinists as Paganini and Sarasate, preferring instead to devote himself to insightful interpretations of the classical repertory. He met Brahms in 1853. Both men were just beginning their careers and they soon established a friendship based in no small part on shared musical values.

Though not always smooth, their relationship endured some 44 years, until Brahms’s death in 1897, and produced a number of tangible results, the greatest coming in 1878. In August of that year, the composer, who habitually understated his creative efforts, wrote to Joachim that he was sending him “a few violin passages” to try out. These proved to be the first movement and part of the finale to a concerto he had sketched during the summer. Joachim responded enthusiastically and encouraged Brahms to proceed with the work.

During the following months, the two musicians corresponded frequently and met several times to try out portions of the concerto as it took shape. Brahms originally planned a work in four movements (he would realize this unorthodox concerto format three years later in his Second Piano Concerto), but eventually discarded the two central movements in favor of what he belittled as a “poor Adagio.”

Knowing the esteem in which Brahms held Joachim, it is not difficult to imagine this composition as a kind of portrait of, or homage to, the violinist. The first movement is marked by a blend of unpretentious grandeur and controlled energy established in the long orchestral exposition. Characteristically, Brahms forges each of the themes presented in this passage from several brief interlocking melodies that expand, develop and play off each other. The violin proceeds to amplify this thematic material and contributes an exceptionally lovely melody of its own. 

The “poor Adagio” is clearly an expression of great tenderness and affection. Brahms opens with one of his most beautiful and long-breathed melodies. (It is also one of the greatest oboe solos in orchestral literature.) Although the music passes across more troubled thoughts in the central portion of the movement, it returns to its initial melodic impulse and the peaceful vein in which this portion of the concerto began.

The Hungarian flavor of the finale is certainly a bow to Joachim, who was not only of Hungarian descent but had himself written a “Hungarian Concerto” and dedicated it to Brahms. It is, above all, the recurring principal theme of this rondo-form movement that evokes the gypsy violin style that both Joachim and Brahms knew and loved.

WITOLD LUTOSŁAWSKI
Concerto for Orchestra
BORN: January 25, 1913, in Warsaw
DIED: February 7, 1994, in Warsaw
WORK COMPOSED: 1950–54
WORLD PREMIERE: November 26, 1954, in Warsaw, with Witold Rowicki conducting Poland’s National Philharmonic Orchestra.

What to Listen For:

• The term “concerto for orchestra” denotes a piece in which virtuosity and lively musical discourse — signature traits of concerto composition — are used in a purely orchestral work, without resorting to a single featured instrument.

As our perspective on the musical developments of the second half of the 20th century comes more clearly into focus, the late Witold Lutosławski’s standing as one of the most skilled and conscientious musical creators of that time grows ever more assured. Lutosławski was the leading member of a school of Polish composers that emerged as an exceptionally vital and creative force after World War II. Imaginative, poetic and meticulously crafted, his compositions reflect their author’s questing musical intellect and artistic integrity.

Lutosławski’s compositional style and concerns evolved over the course of his career to embrace several developments that characterize 20th-century music. His early works, written in the 1940s and ’50s, drew on Polish folk music, which the composer assimilated into an energetic modern idiom much as Béla Bartók did with Hungarian and Balkan folk tunes. After the mid-1950s, Lutosławski’s outlook became increasingly cosmopolitan and daring. But though he investigated many cutting-edge compositional procedures, Lutosławski was never the follower of any particular school or doctrine. Nor did he experiment with novelty simply for its own sake. Instead, Lutosławski used various innovations in a thoughtful and individual manner, always with a keen instinct for their artistic possibilities. Moreover, he never sought the limelight of celebrity, and his works never give the impression of being self-consciously avant-garde or gimmicky in any way. On the contrary, each seems an authentic statement by a dignified and deeply committed artist.

Concerto for Orchestra, completed in 1954, is a pivotal work, revealing both an inventive extension of Lutosławski’s folk-music idiom and some of the unusual harmonies, colors and textures that mark his later music. It is a large piece in three movements. The first opens with a theme that emerges tentatively from fragmented motifs given out by the cellos and violas over the steady tramp of timpani and harp. Other ideas are introduced and explored in a succession of contrasting episodes, but the initial subject returns in the form of a series of woodwind and violin solos to close this initial portion of the work.

The second movement begins and concludes as a “nocturnal” scherzo, with scurrying figures that seem a distant echo of the famous scherzo from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream. A weightier central section gives the movement contrast and balance.

The finale is in two parts. It opens as a passacaglia, a classical form that has music unfolding over a recurring theme, here plucked out by the low strings in the opening measures. With each repetition of this theme, Lutosławski adds successive threads to a contrapuntal fabric that grows increasingly intricate and energetic. Later, the composer treats the passacaglia theme freely in an animated section he describes as a toccata, another classical term, one indicating just this kind of highly rhythmic music. Soon, however, a new element appears: a chorale-like melody first announced by the oboes. The orchestra then returns to the toccata, building to a climax crowned by a majestic restatement of the chorale. The music is marked throughout by a fierce but masterfully controlled energy and virtuosic treatment of the orchestra that justifies the work’s title.

All notes by Paul Schiavo © 2022