Johannes Brahms – Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 (1891)

I once named Brahms’s First Clarinet Sonata (1894) as my single favorite piece of the second half of the 19th century.  I also remember loving the Second (also 1894) when I listened to it for a precursor to this blog, though I have to admit I don’t remember it well at this point.  Considering that the Clarinet Quintet was written only three years earlier, and for the same clarinetist, I’m amazed that it took me this long to listen to it.  I do know why:  it’s because of a time years ago when I tried to listen to it and found it thick and dense and impenetrable.  I remember feeling like the instruments were packed together like bricks, unable to breathe.  I figured that it probably just needed a few more spins to make sense, but I was afraid of being disappointed, and of being unable to explain why I didn’t like one of the Great Classics — and an all-time favorite of two of my best friends.

But it turns out I was right:  it did just need a few more spins.  Also a good performance — it took me a while to find one on Naxos Online that actually had soul and weight and meaning, but I did eventually succeed:  it’s got Ralph Manno on clarinet and, oddly, a quartet whose members are named individually.  The piece is beautiful but very introverted and somber, not the sort that opens up to strangers easily.  It doesn’t even have the overt crypticness of the Clarinet Sonatas:  it’s stripped down, but it’s not aphoristic, it takes its time.   It has an air of mournful Slavic folk music, a tendency to stack the instruments into big blocks (see, I was right!), and above all, an emphasis on the cool, round, smooth, bluish sound of the clarinet, set off against the dark green foliage of the strings.

Every movement starts as one thing and turns into something else.  A gentle Andantino that recalls the last-movement theme of the First Symphony (1876) gives way to the nervous music of horse hooves on the streets of Vienna.  A wistful Adagio turns into a a strange study in red and black and gold, with elaborate clarinet lines built over big tremolo chords in the strings.  And in the first movement, the development section goes off on a long tangent, a noble melody in eighth notes that fits uncomfortably over a stuttering accompaniment, like an inversion of the shocking passage in the Cavatina of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet (1827) in which a fragmented sixteenth-note melody attempts and fails to emerge from a texture of eighth-note triplets.  Even the finale, which suffers from the same problem as most tonal variation movements — namely, it’s tiresome to hear the same harmonic motion over and over again — takes an unexpected turn at the very end and becomes a vague fever dream of the first movement.

I wish I had time to write more, and to listen to the piece again before writing, but I’ve got to bounce.  Stay tuned!

Johannes Brahms – Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 (1878)

It’s a bit ridiculous how little Brahms I know considering how much I love some of his pieces, especially the Third Symphony (1883), the First Clarinet Sonata (1894) and the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel (1861).  But I had a good reason for not having checked out the Violin Concerto before:  I don’t like violin concerti.

OK, that’s obviously an exaggeration.  But I don’t find instrumental virtuosity nearly as exciting as most people seem to, I’ve never liked the sound of solo string instruments as much as the sound of, well, most other things, and I tend to find a lot of the kind of virtuoso writing that shows up in 19th-century concertos really boring.  In particular, I’ve noticed that if there are fast scales or arpeggios without real harmonic motion underpinning it, it just feels like the music is spinning its wheels to me.  (I’m looking at you, Neapolitan pedal in the Appassionata.)  And I will admit that when I finally sat down and listened to the Brahms Violin Concerto, rather than hearing snatches of it in P.T. Anderson movie credits, my first thought was “why did someone scribble all over this perfectly good symphony?”

A couple of listenings later, the piece works a lot better for me.  For one thing, I realized that I’m listening to a studio recording, with the violin mixed very high so that it’s always audible over the orchestra — but Brahms was a contrapuntalist, writing for an unamplified group that would be heard in an open concert hall, which means that a lot of that violin “filler” may well have been intended to be accompanimental.  The other thing that helped was paying more attention to the piece’s structure, because man is Brahms playing fast and loose with sonata form here.  The basic outlines of the form are there, but the dramatic arc has almost nothing to do with typical sonata dynamics.  There’s no straight-like motion from tonic to dominant, wandery development, return to tonic and circuitous hedging to get the second theme group back in the tonic this time.  Instead, the piece is driven largely by the basic principle of the concerto, namely sharp contrast, and if you try to frame it in terms of two expositions, development and recap, you find strange disjunctions, growths and lacunae.

For example:  one of the first things that happens in the piece is a trumphant, repetitive D-major fanfare — the kind of thing you’d normally find at the end of a piece, heading towards a final cadence, and it feels weirdly “unearned” happening so soon.  This passage is entirely missing from the second exposition — and in fact, it’s hard to tell exactly where the second exposition even starts.  You could place it at the entrance of the solo violin — except that it enters in the parallel minor, and the music it plays draws not only on the movement’s first theme, but also on what had seemed to be the second theme, a sharp-edged, martial tune that initially appears in the minor dominant.  Except that once you heard the second exposition, you realize that Brahms has been holding out on you:  it’s only then that we hear the real second theme, a yearning melody full of chromatic appoggiaturas, at long last in the right key, A Major.  Strangest of all, it’s sandwiched in between two eerie chorale-like passages that repeat five-note groups in six-beat patterns (shades of isorhythm!), which in the first exposition had seemed to be part of the same musical paragraph.  And that martial tune in A minor now seems be a transitional gesture explicitly designed to blur the beginnings of sections, a patch sewn on to cover up the seams.

And then there’s the development section, which seems at times to be constructed using Stravinskian cut-and-paste methods.  A violent, bombastic (in the best way!) exploration of the martial material abruptly gives way to the second theme, all souped up with the first violins and cellos playing two octaves apart and the other strings playing pizzicato arpeggios, which then gives way to four bars of quiet spooky isorhythmic chorale, and so on — no transition, barely any modulation, just chunks of music stuck together like a found-object sculpture.

I’ll admit, there are still some passages where I feel like the violin is noodling around, and I sure didn’t need to hear a three-minute cadenza, even if it is played by Jascha Heifetz — but overall I find the movement pretty fascinating.  It doesn’t tug at my soul like the second movement of the First Clarinet Sonata or make me feel like I’m taking over the universe like the finale of the Third Symphony, but it’s often beautiful, touching, invigorating and clearly the work of someone with a tremendous imagination, and I can see why someone who’s more into the whole concerto thing than me would fall in love with it.

As I always with these traditional-form pieces, I’ve wound up talking forever about the first movement.  I’ll admit, the second seems pretty bland to me — sure, it’s pleasant and pretty, but this kind of simple, mostly diatonic major-mode melody thing never really grabbed me when Beethoven did it and it doesn’t really grab me when the heir to his throne does it either.  The third movement, though, that’s another story:  a foot-stomping gypsy dance that uses virtuosity in the best way possible, namely lots of double stops in strict rhythm, without an arpeggio over a pedal point in sight.  If you want to see an example of rhythmic creativity within the confines of a single time signature, look no further than the opening of this movement, with its mixture of three-, four- and five-bar phrases and occasional syncopations that suggest a shift from 2/4 to 3/8.  The end of the movement also demonstrates one of Brahms’s greatest and most weirdly specific gifts, which is the ability to turn any melody in sixteenth notes into a melody in triplet eighths without ever leaving out the wrong notes.  He’s monkeying around with the dramatic structure here, too:  the comic, Rossini-esque recasting of the movement’s main theme keeps getting by an unexpected le, which is followed by a fi (where’d the dominant go?!) and then a long prologation of V, before the music loops right back to where the triplets entered.  When the piece finally gets to climax, it’s a little, let’s say, interruptus.  Sort of feels like Brahms was playing a prank.  Since we all know how renowned he was for his humor.