Dejan Lazic/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra - 29410 Brahms/arr. Lazic - Piano Concerto no.3

flash video, ±18 minutes

JOHANNES BRAHMS / arr. DEJAN LAZIC: PIANO CONCERTO No. 3 IN D MAJOR (after Violin Concerto, op. 77)

Influences and the Process of Arrangement:
From Historical Backgrounds to Composing of an Original Cadenza My source of inspiration was a joint one: the piano versions of the Violin Concertos of Bach and Beethoven, which were made by the composers themselves.
I started working on this project in early 2003 and completed it in 2008. The violin was always a favourite love, and I continue to hold violinists in high esteem, realising just how wonderful their literature is. Thus far, I have been tremendously lucky to have had many an opportunity to perform with some wonderful colleagues. And it is with a degree of pride that I present – after Bach and Beethoven – the third “great B” in the present arrangement.

Subjectivity plays a role of course, and I have always found this particular concerto, along with Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto, to be amongst the best instrumental concertos ever written. Naturally, I felt the challenge to arrange the Brahms early on. I was intrigued by the idea of rendering it in an idiomatic version for piano and orchestra. The ultimate aim was clear: I wanted to perform it myself!
Perhaps composer and piano virtuoso Muzio Clementi felt the same way after listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Shortly after the performance, he asked Beethoven to arrange it for piano and orchestra, for he had fallen in love with this beautiful piece and wanted to play it himself, to present it to London audiences, and to make it as popular in England as it was on the Continent at the time.
It is also interesting to note how Beethoven treats the first movement's original Cadenza and how that passage holds major significance for him in the new arrangement: there, he composed an entirely new Cadenza and scored it for piano and timpani no less.
Similarly, in my piano version of the Brahms Violin Concerto, I composed a new Cadenza, for the simple reason that there is no extant Brahms Cadenza. Added to which, Cadenzas by Joachim, Kreisler or Heifetz remain 'stubbornly' suited to the violin, and are not really pianistic in their conception of the music; any arrangement of these would detract too much from their very essence. Besides, should not every Cadenza be sort of a “free area”, one in which every soloist ought to be able to improvise on material previously heard?
The desire to arrange a violin concerto as a piano concerto just because one envisages donning the garb of the soloist, is not a good enough motive to take on this challenge. But I also do not feel there is any other romantic violin concerto that would survive the transformation.
At a musicological level, the correspondence between Brahms and his dedicatee Joseph Joachim played a major role for me. After numerous changes, much good advice, and actual corrections by Joachim it remains quite clear that Brahms had always composed as a pianist (at the piano) and therefore felt this music as a pianist, if also as a symphonic composer (originally, Brahms wrote the Violin Concerto in four movements, which was typical for a symphony). It is quite obvious that the Violin Concerto had its roots in both friendship and practicality: his aim was to write a concerto for Joachim, from which we can infer the term concerto took on a greater significance than the violin itself. But we are skating on thin ice here, what I mean to say is that it is quite justified to speculate about what would have happened if Joachim had been a cellist or a clarinettist, or even… a pianist!
What emerges from the text most readily is a liberal dose of difficulty that is simply not in the nature of the violin: Brahms remained first and foremost a pianist and thus on the outside of the world of a violin virtuoso. Maybe this explains why Hans von Bülow once described the concerto as being "against the violin". Sarasate, for his part, simply refused to play it, and Vieniawski commented that it was "simply unplayable". That is as may be, and we now know this not to be the case.
But another – possibly more important – question pops its head above the parapet: is one actually "allowed" to make such an arrangement?
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Brahms made countless arrangements and transcriptions of his and other composers' works. I am convinced these were more than justified; hence, I hope that Brahms himself would not have anything against my idea. Let us dwell for a moment on Brahms and his contemporaries (not least Franz Liszt), who made a plethora of transcriptions, arrangements, variations, and produced much else besides. Nowadays, we seem to fail to cherish this great tradition. Maybe I am behaving here more as a composer than a performer – the line that divides production and reproduction is obviously an extremely thin one.
Again, turn your thoughts to Brahms's beautiful Violin Sonata in G major, and then, if you will, to his own transcription of the piece for cello: what emerges is the wonderful Cello Sonata in D major, the composer wisely recasting the work in another key. A new tonality, another instrument. Altered and modified, the piece experiences a kind of transmogrification. The musical metamorphosis is complete. The same goes for both masterly written Clarinet Sonatas which Brahms transcribed for Viola, or his version of Bach's famous Chaconne for violin solo in D minor - for piano/left hand! At the end of the day, this is about music and not about the institutionalization of music...

What lingers is the rhetorical question of what is a transcription, what makes an arrangement, what may be defined as a new version. The key to this conundrum is that I sought to construct anew the violin part, recomposing the voice in a thorough-going Brahmsian style and adding my own Cadenza. Throughout the piece that was my thought: to imagine what Brahms would do. Of great import is that the orchestral score remains entirely unchanged! With this arrangement - done solely out of respect and admiration for the composer - my main goal was to translate Brahms's unique musical language into a new setting without losing any of its original musical value and, in addition, to give pianists an equal chance to perform and enjoy this wonderful music the same way violinists do for exactly 130 years now.

Performing Practice: Aesthetics, Tempo, Rhythm and Rubato
Joachim's understanding of Brahms's notation and expectations can be explored through a range of sources: from his correspondence with Brahms and the famous Joachim-Moser "Violinschule" to his five recordings from 1903, which allow us to understand much that would otherwise remain unclear. Furthermore, Joachim was seen as putting his extraordinary technical abilities at the service of "high artistic ideal" and his "severity and purity of style, which strives to hide the charms of virtuosity rather than accentuate them" was much praised by Hanslick.
Brahms was notoriously unwilling to specify tempo by means of metronome and so he provided no guidance for the Violin Concerto beyond the Italian tempo terms. Joachim's metronome marks of 1905 are probably a reliable guide to the tempo at which he himself performed the concerto. They are, in some respects, surprising; quarter note = 126 for the rich, symphonic and rather rhapsodic first movement and quarter note = 104 for the Hungarian-inspired Rondo are very much faster then the tempo taken by modern violinists. Bernard D. Sherman has observed that they are "far faster than any recording known to me". Joachim himself was well aware of the fact that these metronome marks might make the concerto "too difficult to play". The marking eighth note = 72 for the chorale-like, poetic second movement (originally 'Un poco larghetto', later changed by Brahms to 'Adagio') is also rather brisk in relation to conventional interpretations.
Joachim's approach to rhythm was very different from that of contemporary violinists, who adhere closely to the written text in this respect. His recordings reveal that his performance of the written rhythms is very free, but within a more or less regular pulse. His use of un-notated rubato, in the sense of absolute increase or decrease of tempo, is generally restrained and subtle.
How essential any of these factors may be to a stylistically convincing performance of this concerto remains debatable. But, as Clive Brown states correctly: "Brahms himself was remarkably flexible about how his music should be performed, accepting that there was no single valid approach, though he was perfectly cabaple of walking out of a performance that displeased him..."

JOHANNES BRAHMS: 2 RHAPSODIES, op. 79 & SCHERZO, op. 4
Brahms composed the 2 Rhapsodies, op. 79 in summer 1879 - in the same year his Violin Concerto op. 77 saw its premiere in Leipzig! At first, No. 1 was entitled "Capriccio", obviously because of its agitated character, but later changed to "Presto agitato", and the marking of the passionate and, just like the Violin Concerto's Rondo, Hungarian-inspired No. 2 was "Molto passionato". But when Clara Schumann played the work at a private performance, she took tempi substantially slower, which led Brahms to delete the "Presto" of the former and to qualify the "Molto passionato" of the latter by adding "ma non troppo Allegro" in the engraver's copy. However, the 'Rhapsodies' were dedicated to Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, the wife of Heinrich von Herzogenberg, professor of music in Berlin, and herself an excellent pianist. At her suggestion, Brahms reluctantly renamed the sophisticated compositions from 'Klavierstücke' ('Piano Pieces') to 'Rhapsodies' and already before the publication she wrote to Brahms on May 3, 1880: "The title 'Rhapsodies' is probably the most suitable after all, even though the concise f orm of the pieces appears almost to contradict the meaning of the word 'rhapsodic'."
The earliest surviving original composition of Johannes Brahms, Scherzo, op. 4 was composed in 1851 when Brahms was only 18 years old and already highly active as a pianist. It remains one of Brahms's larger solo piano works in which he was obviously influenced by the same form composed by Beethoven (the main Scherzo part) and Chopin (Trio II). The style of Trio I however reminds very much of Schubert's 'Moments Musicaux'. Especially in this piece, Brahms maintained a Classical sense of form and order, and both, somewhat intimate Trio I and rather passionate and truly romantic Trio II are in huge contrast to the virtuosic, energetic, and highly rhythmical main Scherzo part in exotic and distant key of E-flat minor.

Dejan Lazic