i love the way kempff accomplishes these. he takes slow tempi, but they are full of deliberation and conviction. i think everything brahms wanted to come through does so magnificently in his interpretations. there's just a hint of melancholy which keeps it from being virtuosic (the way it sounds when rubinstein, for example, plays them), but for me they don't sink into dirges or anything like that.
in order, the pieces are:
No. 1. Intermezzo in A minor. Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato
No. 2. Intermezzo in A major. Andante teneramente
No. 3. Ballade in G minor. Allegro energico
No. 4. Intermezzo in F minor. Allegretto un poco agitato
No. 5. Romance in F major. Andante
No. 6. Intermezzo in E flat minor. Andante, largo e mesto
these were written in 1893 and composed for Clara Schumann. there's much to be said for performing them as a set, as the keys not only form a relationship based on the second (Am-AM-Gm-Fm-FM-Ebm), but the secondary key areas for all the middle sections of these pieces are also linked tonally in ways which i won't go into here (a reasonable link discussing these relationships).
i think kempff does a good job of bringing out some motifs that will catch your ear across all six pieces, another reason for performing/listening to these all in a group. the first is grandiose but runs the danger of getting thick. it treats its keys ambiguously in the best of brahmsian fashion, sounding in F Major for the first statement, and only in the developmental middle section does it begin to yearn for an A minor cadence - which it actually only reaches for the first time in the piece at around 1:00. and the piece actually concludes in A Major, the key of the second work.
here i think Brahms does some of his best voicing. as a result the important motifs are pretty much clear as day. my favorite moment in this respect is in the middle section which is in F minor, where you hear the descending motif in the right hand but also augmented in the top notes of the left hand, at the same time (around 1:39 and much more clearly again about 10 seconds later). the result is a lot of parallel sixths ringing out of the texture. the same thing emerges in the latter half of the development section which is more urgent and as a result compressed.
for now my personal favorite is the more lively ballade, no. 3. i enjoy the dovetailing of the left hand accompaniment with the melodic notes in the right. harmonically the most interesting thing is that while the introduction is decisively in g minor (with a second statement in e-flat major), it utilizes g major dominant chords (the V of iv) to gravitate the middle section towards B Major, which isn't really anything in G minor but found by chromatic motion. The same with the brief modulation to D-sharp minor, (enharmonically E-flat minor, but he spells it as the former).
the transition back to g minor involves a move to G Major first, and the same chromatic adjustment to a-flat major, C dominant 7 again, then V-i to minor.
the very last chords are an unusual cadence from VI-i (eb major to g minor, first inversion).
now we find ourselves in f minor, with an unsettled set of triplets that switches from hand to hand. for me the magic happens in the middle section, which is a placid section of held chords which move over a tolling low note in the left hand. when the recap comes it is outspoken rather than muted, and never quite regains its composure until the end of the piece in glistening f major, the key of the next piece.
for me the thing that strikes me immediately about this fifth piece is that even though the tune our ears will gravitate towards is placed in the middle - he knows that we'll notice it because it is the quickest-moving voice, with the nice eighth note pattern coming in later variations - the top voice is to the letter the same as the descending theme in the middle section of the a major intermezzo (no. 2). the middle section, in d major, is fluttering and ethereal. the moment when it plummets into d minor is pretty remarkable, at about 2:33. at the moment before the recap he writes an A-Bb trill which goes up, characteristically and ambiguously, to a C-D trill which suggests C Major, the dominant to F, without ever actually stating it (both the E and G are missing).
the beginning of the sixth piece is the most ambiguous of all, with a dislocated play on Eb-F-Gb which turns out to fit into a fully diminished A7 chord, giving pretty much no indication of where we are now. we settle uneasily into Eb minor about 20 seconds in, but series of thirds and the lack of any real cadence in the tonic key along with the murmuring in the left hand (including plenty of diminished chords) destabilize the tonality. we hit a little detour into D-flat Major/B-flat minor, which take us into the relative major of Gb for the middle section, where it stays for all of three bars before veering into the minor areas of Bb minor.
for me it seems as if the entire piece revolves around the note of Gb, but fitting it into as many different contexts as he can get to. brahms had a thing for the ambiguity of the III, and here i think he pivots around it quite characteristically.
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