Leif Ove Andsnes
and Friends
Saturday 28 May 2016 7.00pm
Milton Court Concert Hall
Brahms Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, Op 25
interval 20 minutes
Chris Aadland
Brahms Piano Quartet No 2 in A major, Op 26
Brahms Piano Quartet No 3 in C minor, Op 60
Leif Ove Andsnes piano
Christian Tetzlaff violin
Tabea Zimmermann viola
Clemens Hagen cello
Part of the LSO Artist Portrait on
Leif Ove Andsnes
Part of Barbican Presents 2015–16
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
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Welcome
Welcome to this evening’s concert, the
Barbican’s contribution towards the current
LSO Artist Portrait series featuring the
celebrated Norwegian pianist Leif Ove
Andsnes.
one of the sunniest of Brahms’s large-scale
pieces. To perform them, Leif Ove is joined by
three of the finest string players on the planet:
Christian Tetzlaff, Tabea Zimmermann and
Clemens Hagen.
Following appearances earlier this month
with the London Symphony Orchestra in
concertos by Mozart and Schumann, he
now turns his attention to the chamber
music of Brahms. The three piano quartets
are such a substantial feast that they rarely
appear in a single concert, but tonight we
have the opportunity to explore Brahms’s
development from the turbulent G minor
Quartet, written when he was still in his
twenties, to the unequivocal mastery of the
Third. The Second acts as a counterweight,
Looking ahead, the LSO Artist Portrait series
ends on 10 June with a solo recital featuring
Leif Ove’s beloved Sibelius, along with
works by Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy.
Meanwhile, the Barbican Presents series
concludes with two contrasting piano recitals:
Steven Osborne performs the music of
Crumb and Feldman on 31 May and Murray
Perahia plays Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’
Sonata alongside Haydn, Mozart and
Brahms on 20 June.
I hope you enjoy the concert.
Huw Humphreys
Head of Music
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
2
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Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, Op 25
(1857–61)
1 Allegro . 2 Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo
3 Andante con moto . 4 Rondo alla Zingarese: Presto
Programme notes
Johannes Brahms (1833–97)
Piano Quartet No 2 in C major, Op 26 (1862)
1 Allegro non troppo . 2 Poco adagio
3 Scherzo: Poco allegro . 4 Finale: Allegro
Piano Quartet No 3 in C minor, Op 60
(1855–6/1873–5)
1 Allegro non troppo . 2 Scherzo: Allegro
3 Andante . 4 Finale: Allegro comodo
Brahms’s First Piano Quartet is a product of
turbulent times. The first ideas probably began to
form around 1857, the year following the death
of Brahms’s inspiring but also highly unstable
mentor Robert Schumann. The score wasn’t
completed however until September 1861. At this
stage composing on a large scale took Brahms
a colossal amount of mental effort and plenty
of angst. To make matters worse, he was also
grappling with another, still more obstinate piano
quartet, the one we know as No 3, but which
didn’t reach its familiar final form until 1875, two
decades later.
Part of the problem was that Schumann had laid
a huge burden of responsibility on his young
protégé. The symphony, Schumann insisted, was
Brahms’s true vocation: and Brahms clearly saw
large-scale chamber works as a way of practising
fully fledged symphonic writing – just as Schubert
before him had seen his A minor and ‘Death and
the Maiden’ quartets as stages on his ‘path to a
grand symphony’. But the great model Schumann
had in mind, Beethoven, was an abominably hard
act to follow. ‘Have you any idea how difficult it is’,
Brahms grumbled several years later, ‘with such a
giant marching behind you?’
To make matters worse, Brahms was also
wrestling with his feelings for Schumann’s widow
Clara. There has been plenty of argument about
the precise nature of their relationship. Was Clara
Brahms’s lover, platonic muse or an eroticised
mother figure? (She was 14 years older than him.)
Whatever the case, his attachment was intense
and apparently lifelong. Evidence of this inner
conflict can be heard in the First Piano Quartet,
not only in the Sturm und Drang character of the
opening movement, but in the telling use of a
musical code, invented by Schumann, associated
with the woman Brahms now adored. The
plaintive little figure played by the first violin at
the start of the Intermezzo second movement
is a transposed version of Schumann’s motif,
C–B–A–G sharp–A: the B standing for ‘L’ and the
G sharp for ‘R’: thus C–L–A–R–A.
The closely argued thematic development of the
first movement, with both long lines and dramatic
contrasts growing from the seminal four-note
3
Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor
motif at the start, clearly represents a big step
towards symphonic thinking. At the same time,
the relationship between the piano and the
string instruments – sometimes stern contention,
sometimes intimate dialogue – shows that Brahms
is developing a true feeling for chamber music. In
the second movement intimacy – here connected
explicitly with the ‘Clara’ motif – comes to the fore.
Brahms originally called this movement ‘Scherzo’,
but he seems to have realised that this was a
long way from the typical dynamic Beethovenian
scherzo; ‘Intermezzo’ is a much better title for this
delicate, nervous, shadow-haunted movement.
The Andante con moto begins with one of those
long-breathed Brahmsian melodies that go on
unfolding for phrase after inspired phrase, all
beautifully suited to the full piano quartet sound.
But the quasi-martial central section is more
like an arrangement of an orchestral piece, the
kind of arrangement popular in middle-class
households in Brahms’s time. After this comes the
Rondo alla Zingarese (‘Gypsy Rondo’), firmly in
the dark minor key, yet worlds away from tragedy.
Brahms had a lifelong love for Hungarian folk
music and this wild Hungarian hoedown – with its
almost silent-cinema piano cadenza near the end
– suggests a healthy resolution to dance Sturm
und Drang right out of the system. The dark but
exhilarating coda shows that, despite what Hugo
Wolf later claimed, Brahms could indeed ‘exult’.
interval: 20 minutes
Piano Quartet No 2 in A major
4
If the Second Piano Quartet sounds as though
it had a much less difficult birth than either of its
minor-key neighbours, the evidence bears this
out. Certainly the labour was far less protracted!
Overall this is one of Brahms’s sunniest chamber
works; it is also the longest, most performances
weighing in at around 50 minutes. But in this
case the length has less to do with Brahms’s
symphonic ambitions, and rather more to do
with his growing love for the music of Schubert,
whose large-scale works – heinously neglected
in his own lifetime – were beginning to be
discovered and valued around the time Brahms
wrote this quartet. His mentor Schumann had
praised Schubert for his ‘heavenly length’ – a
spaciousness born not from extended musical
argument, but from a wonderful melodic
generosity. Brahms’s own love of generating long,
continually evolving melodies owes much more to
Schubert than it does to Beethoven.
The Second Piano Quartet’s first movement
shows a side of Brahms’s musical character
for which he still isn’t given enough credit – his
feeling for rhythm. The finale of the First Quartet
made great play with decidedly un-Classical,
un-Germanic three-bar phrase lengths, but in the
Second Quartet’s opening the rhythmic games
are gentler and subtler. Listening to the piano’s
relaxed opening theme it isn’t always easy to tell
where the beat is. The alternation of triplets and
duplets (one–two–three one–two–three one–
two–three–four) and the carefully positioned rests
make this theme unusually rhythmically slippery.
But that in itself makes it ripe for development,
as Brahms shows throughout this long but
remarkably fertile movement. The feeling for
intimate instrumental dialogue that emerges in
sections of the First Quartet is intensified and
enriched here. A lovely example comes in the
coda, where the ‘slippery’ opening rhythm is
shared between piano and strings, but at a
beat’s distance – a kind of affectionately mockacademic canon.
After this comes what Brahms’s friend the
virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Joachim
aptly called the ‘wonderful Poco adagio with
its ambiguous passion’. In its alternation of
delicious long-breathed lyricism with moments
of mystery and, later, darker outbursts, it
feels at times like a conscious tribute to one
of Schubert’s half transcendent, half deathhaunted slow movements. Brahms titled the
third movement ‘Scherzo’, but again its gently
flowing opening idea is far closer to Schubert
than to any of Beethoven’s titanic models – until,
that is, the rugged minor-key Trio turns wistful,
tender instrumental dialogue into dramatic
confrontation. Like the First Quartet, folk music
– possibly with more of a Slavic accent this time –
leaves its mark on the Finale. As in the other three
movements (and in marked contrast to the First
and Third Quartets), Brahms allows the material
plenty of time to work itself out: further evidence
of how liberating he found the encounter with
Schubert – there were more ways of creating
large-scale forms than via Beethoven’s tense,
concentrated dialectical drama.
pause: 5 minutes
Brahms may have seen composing the First,
and perhaps also the Second Piano Quartet
as an important stage on the ‘path to a grand
symphony’, but what he also discovered in
the process was how valuable chamber music
could be as a vehicle for his more private
thoughts and feelings. Not that this meant
an end to his artistic struggles. The Third
Quartet is perhaps the most personal, the most
autobiographical even, of all his chamber
works – which must at least partly explain why
it took him so long to complete it and release it
into the world.
for copycat suicides. By adopting this bluff
jocular posture Brahms may have been trying
to convince himself that he had overcome the
emotional trials of his younger self. But when
he sent the completed score off to his publisher
Simrock, the compulsion was clearly still there –
only now Brahms seems to have got the clothing
issue right:
‘On the cover you must have a picture, namely
a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form
some conception of the music! I’ll send you my
photograph for the purpose. You can use the
blue coat, yellow trousers and top-boots, since
you seem to like colour printing.’
Programme notes
Piano Quartet No 3 in C minor
There is however nothing jocular about the
music. At the opening, one of the darkest
in all Brahms, the piano’s stark octaves are
followed on the strings by another version of
the ‘Clara’ motif, outlined in the First Quartet’s
second-movement Intermezzo. This time
however a slight stammering hesitation on the
first two notes could almost be said to utter
Clara’s name. According to Brahms, only this
sombre, passionate first movement and the
succeeding Scherzo survive from the original
Quartet of 1855–6, but there’s little, if any sense
of discontinuity with the two movements that
follow – a fact that has led some commentators
to speculate that they may also be based on
First, to his friend, the surgeon Theodor Billroth material from 1855–6 or thereabouts. The
Brahms writes that he has given the quartet
Scherzo is unusually stormy and driven by
a thorough overhaul, revising two of the
Brahms’s standards. But then the Andante
movements and composing two completely
begins with what sounds like an exquisitely
new ones. The result, he says, is ‘a curiosity
tender love song for cello and piano, eventually
– perhaps an illustration for the last chapter
answered – as though in a kind of ideal duet –
about the man in the blue coat and the yellow
by the violin. A restless violin solo, against rapid
waistcoat’. This – as just about everyone in the
running figures on the piano, launches perhaps
German-speaking world would have realised
the most enigmatic of Brahms’s finales. Storms
at the time – was a reference to Johann
soon erupt again, but then what might be the
Wolfgang von Goethe’s hugely successful novel significance of the hymn-like second theme for
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which
strings, with its almost teasing piano responses?
depicts an agonising love-triangle: Werther is
Minor-key tension yields at the last minute to
desperately in love with a woman betrothed
a notionally brighter C major: a hushed string
to another, older man, one whom Werther
chord then two emphatic thuds from the full
admires. Convinced that the only way to end this ensemble. But, as the writer Donald Tovey aptly
painful emotional impasse is to remove himself put it, this comes far ‘too late for happiness’.
from the equation, Werther shoots himself. The
Perhaps the kind of deliverance Brahms had
novel was such a success that across Europe
in mind was closer to that of Goethe’s tortured
moody young men took to dressing in Werther’s young hero.
trademark blue coat and yellow trousers.
(Brahms was wrong about the waistcoat.) It’s
Programme notes © Stephen Johnson
even reported that there was a passing vogue
5
He began working on the quartet in 1855, the
year after Schumann had been admitted to a
lunatic asylum, leaving the 22-year-old Brahms
to help out in the Schumann household. There
is evidence that at some stage during this
traumatic period Brahms’s painfully conflicting
feelings for Clara Schumann led him to
consider suicide. When he came to take up the
quartet again in 1873–4, nearly 20 years later,
he made a series of strange statements about
the work’s emotional character. At face value
they look like black jokes, self-mockery of a
peculiarly blunt kind. But the posture is almost
certainly defensive.
Giorgia Bertazzi
Özgür Albayrak
About the performers
Leif Ove Andsnes
Christian Tetzlaff
Leif Ove Andsnes piano
Christian Tetzlaff violin
Leif Ove Andsnes gives recitals and plays
concertos in the world’s leading concert halls and
with its foremost orchestras, besides being an
active recording artist. An avid chamber musician,
he was co-artistic director of the Risør Festival for
nearly two decades and this August launches the
Rosendal Chamber Music Festival in Norway. He
was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame
in 2013.
Equally at home in Classical, Romantic and
contemporary repertoire, Christian Tetzlaff sets
standards with his interpretations of the violin
concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky,
Berg and Ligeti, and is renowned for his innovative
chamber music projects and Bach performances.
Last autumn saw the release of Concerto –
A Beethoven Journey, a documentary directed by
Phil Grabsky. This chronicles Leif Ove Andsnes’s
four-season focus on Beethoven’s music for piano
and orchestra, which took him to 108 cities in 27
countries for more than 230 live performances.
Other highlights of this season include major
European and North American solo recital
tours, as well as Schumann and Mozart
concerto collaborations in the USA with the
Chicago Symphony, Cleveland and Philadelphia
orchestras. In Europe he appears with the Bergen
and Munich Philharmonic orchestras, Zurich
Tonhalle, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and
London Symphony Orchestra, as well as on the
current tour of Brahms’s piano quartets.
6
Leif Ove Andsnes now records exclusively for
Sony Classical and his Beethoven Journey with
the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has won many
awards. His discography also features more than
30 discs for EMI Classics, in repertoire ranging
from Bach to the present day.
He regularly works with many of today’s leading
orchestras and conductors and this season
performs with the Boston and San Francisco
Symphony orchestras, Philadelphia Orchestra,
Minnesota Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus
Orchestra, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie
Bremen, Staatskapelle Dresden, Israel and
London Philharmonic orchestras and Budapest
Festival Orchestra.
Chamber music activities include a one-week
residency at Toppan Hall in Tokyo, concerts with
regular trio partners Lars Vogt and Tanja Tetzlaff,
as well as with the Tetzlaff Quartet, and the
current tour of Brahms’s piano quartets.
Christian Tetzlaff’s recordings have received
numerous prizes, including the Diapason
d’Or, Edison, MIDEM Classical and ECHO
Klassik awards. His discography includes violin
concertos by Beethoven, Dvořák, Lalo, Mozart,
Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Jörg
Widmann; Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Mambo Blues
and Tarantella; violin sonatas by Mozart, Bartók,
Schumann and Brahms; and Bach’s Solo Sonatas
and Partitas.
About the performers
Clemens Hagen
Tabea Zimmermann viola
Clemens Hagen cello
Tabea Zimmermann is one of the most renowned
musicians of our time and her charismatic
personality and deep musical understanding are
valued equally by both her audiences and her
fellow musicians.
Cellist Clemens Hagen was born in Salzburg
into a family of musicians. He started playing
the cello at the age of 6, becoming a student
at the Salzburg Mozarteum two years later; he
subsequently studied at the Basle Conservatoire
with Wilfried Tachezi and Heinrich Schiff. In 1983
he received a special award from the Vienna
Philharmonic and the Karl Böhm Award.
As a soloist she regularly works with the most
distinguished orchestras worldwide. Highlights
this season include an artistic residency at the
Frankfurt Museums-Gesellschaft, concerts with
Dénes Várjon and the Arcanto Quartet, orchestral
concerts featuring works by Hindemith and
Walton and Bartók’s Viola Concerto with the
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.
He has performed with many major orchestras,
including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic
orchestras, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, Camerata Academica
Salzburg, Freiburg Radio Symphony Orchestra,
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen,
The Arcanto Quartet, with violinists Antje Weithaas Chamber Orchestra of Europe, NHK Symphony
and Daniel Sepec and cellist Jean-Guihen
Orchestra, Tokyo, and the Cleveland Orchestra.
Queyras, continues to be a special focus for her
chamber music activities. This season she gives the As well as concerto performances and his
premiere of a new trio by Jörg Widmann at the
many concerts with the Hagen Quartet, he
Zurich Tonhalle, together with the composer and
has performed chamber music with Martha
Dénes Várjon, as well as taking part in the current Argerich, Renaud Capuçon, Itamar Golan, Paul
tour of Brahms’s piano quartets.
Gulda, Hélène Grimaud, Gidon Kremer, Oleg
Maisenberg, András Schiff, Benjamin Schmid and
Tabea Zimmermann has inspired numerous
Mitsuko Uchida.
composers to write for the viola and has
introduced many new works into the standard
Among his recordings are the Beethoven cello
concert and chamber music repertoire.
sonatas with Paul Gulda and Brahms’s Double
Concerto with Gidon Kremer and the Royal
On the occasion of the Hindemith anniversary
Concertgebouw Orchestra under Nikolaus
in 2013, she released a complete recording of
Harnoncourt. Recent releases include a disc
the composer’s viola works on Myrios Classics,
of chamber music by Brahms and Pfitzner with
which has been highly acclaimed, adding to her
Benjamin Schmid and Claudius Tanski.
substantial and award-winning discography.
7
Marco Borggreve
Tabea Zimmermann
London Symphony Orchestra
Living Music
LSO ARTIST PORTRAIT
Leif Ove Andsnes
‘One of the few who possess
power and personality in
equal measure’
The New Yorker
FRI 10 JUN 7.30PM
The series concludes with a recital
of solo piano works by Sibelius,
Beethoven, Debussy and Chopin
lso.co.uk