A night at the Brahms

We were in London last weekend for a proms concert. I've only been to the Proms twice since my student days in 1982, when I took a holiday in London to attend six concerts, for which I had to queue all afternoon (or, in one case, all day) for cheap standing tickets. The best accoustics are to be had in the standing are and the atmosphere is great. Still, on subsequent occaisons, being older with less time, I've booked seats.

On this occasion, we went with our hosts to hear two of Brahms's greatest works: the second piano concerto and the fourth symphony. Coincidentally, both works have associations with the days when I used to study music theory. It was my theory teacher, the lovely Helen Kane, who introduced me to the concerto. She played the opening bars in class on the piano and asked us what instrument did we think Brahms would have used for the lovely fragment in the first bars, to which the piano responds with beautiful swelling chords. I was learning the french horn at the time and this was what I guessed. I turned out to be right. That opening was what drew me to the piece but there is su much more.

One of the great things about Brahms is how tightly structured his works are. Much as I love, say, Mahler or Tchaikovsky, I don't think they have this appreciation of form and structure which obsessed Brahms. You sometimes feel there is a movement too much, or that the elements of the symphony, lovely as they are, don't make a unified whole. You never get that feeling with Brahms. The second piano concerto is long (nearly an hour) and it has one more movement than the normal three (a brooding scherzo, inserted as the second movement). Still, the work doesn't seem flabby or overblown. The complex opening movement and the subsequent atmospheric scherzo are followed by an achingly beautiful slow movement which opens with a long cello solo and develops almost into a love duet between that instrument and the piano, with only muted support from the orchestra. Finally, a rombustuous finale lifts the mood as the work races towards its glorious end. Emmanuel Ax performed beautifully on the keyboard, with Bernard Haitink conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

The moods of the fourth symphony vary from movement to movement but if there is one word that sums them up to me it's lingering uncertainty. The first movement is very much the classical symphonic opening one but the mood is enigmatic. The second movement opens, likke the concerto, with another horn call. It develops into a richly lyrical piece. One might almost say pastoral, except that these are sheep grazing on northern alpine slopes, not sun-kissed valleys. The third movement is an energetic scherzo and is probably the brightest part, but it would be going too far to describe it as "cheerful" or "sunny", although it is dance-like at times.

Back to music theory. When I was learning about musical form, I read in my rudiments of music that a "passacaglia" is a set of variations built up onn a theme in the base, that it was common in Baroque music (which is true) but that the finale of Brahms's fourth symphony was also in this form. It is practically unique among mainstream symphonies in this respect. He uses a theme from a Bach cantata for his eight bass chords, which open the symphony, followed by a series of contrasting variations. As André Previn pointed out, this is not a dry intellectual exercise. The form he has adopted is very much part and parcel of what he wants to say. The variations represent almost a voyage of the soul, and the structure guarantees that this musical Pilgrim's Progress never deviates from the path. It is the crowning glory on this final symphonic masterpiece by a truly great composer.