Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1

"I always thought", wrote Robert Schumann in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 28 October 1853, "that someone would and, indeed, must suddenly appear who was destined to give expression to our times in the loftiest and most ideal manner imaginable. [...] And he has come. His name is Johannes Brahms. [...] Here is a man of destiny! Seated at the piano, he began to disclose wondrous regions."

Rarely can a young composer have been greeted and welcomed in such emphatic and enthusiastic terms. But the high hopes that Schumann placed in the young Brahms, whom he described as living "in more or less total seclusion", proved a great burden and made life very hard for him.

It was at precisely this time that Brahms began to plan a large-scale sonata for two pianos. He completed three movements but soon realized that - to quote Schumann again - they were "symphonies in disguise", and so it was only logical that in the summer of 1854 he began to orchestrate the first of these movements. It was intended to be a symphony. But he made little headway with the project, perhaps because he was too self-critical. Finally he rewrote the work as a piano concerto, an effortful process that lasted more than four years. In the event only the opening movement was based on material from the original sonata, whereas the second and third movements were both newly composed.

The first performance of the D minor Piano Concerto was planned for 1858, but for various reasons a special instrument that Brahms wanted to bring to Hanover from Kassel was unavailable. As a result, the performance was delayed until 22 January 1859. Brahms himself was the soloist and the conductor was his friend Joseph Joachim. At best, the work proved a succès d'estime, while the second performance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus five days later was an outright fiasco. The music critic Eduard Bernsdorf, for example, wrote of the "barrenness and aridity" of the musical invention, which he dismissed as "utterly beyond hope": "For more than three quarters of an hour one has to endure this retching and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes!"

In describing the work in this way, Bernsdorf had in fact hit the nail on the head, but - as so often with critics - he saw things in a completely wrong light. Brahms's First Piano Concerto does indeed flout all traditional expectations and does so, moreover, not only in terms of its length but also with regard to the symphonic fusion of solo instrument and orchestra. Even the opening movement's first subject, marked "maestoso", is of such keenly chiselled toughness that an audience used to the tinkling blandness of virtuoso concertos was bound to feel nonplussed. According to Brahms's first biographer, Max Kalbeck, the austere severity of this music and especially its wildly irruptive sequences of trills were intended to express the shock and dismay felt by the young composer at Schumann's attempt to kill himself by throwing himself into the Rhine on 27 February 1854. The movement as a whole draws its strength from its unprecedented expressive violence: defiance and rebellion come together here to create a unified mood. This heroic, not to say Promethean, thrust yields only to the broadly singing and lyrical second subject, the almost religious inwardness of which suggests a turning in on oneself.

The Adagio breathes this same atmosphere. Clara Schumann thought that this movement had "something churchlike" about it: "It could be an Eleison." Brahms did indeed write the words "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini" on one of his drafts, a motto that could be applied to the movement as a whole. The opening is dominated by a serene stillness suggestive of inner contemplation, a mood which in the middle section produces a state for which "ecstasy" is not too strong a term. Minor-key modulations briefly darken the picture and the use of rhythmic contrast introduces a note of urgency, but at the end the music reverts to the cantabile quietude of the movement's opening bars. After this, the bucolic character of the finale comes as something of a surprise. Cast in rondo form, it has a strikingly assertive main theme that at the same time is almost dancelike in tone. A second theme provides a sense of contrast with its songlike, hymnic strains, while the development section at the heart of the movement is conceived as a fugato. A brief cadenza leads to the coda, and a work that had begun in so defiant and weighty a manner ends with a show of delight in its own high-spirited playfulness.

"He is a man of destiny. Seated at the piano, he began to disclose wondrous regions." Schumann's hymnlike encomium of the 20-year-old Brahms could equally well have been applied to the 18-year-old Krystian Zimerman when he won the Ninth International Chopin Competition in October 1975. He was the youngest of the 118 competitors - "so young that my teachers were unsure whether I should enter the competition at all. Even I myself was not especially keen on the idea. It was by no means certain at that time that I would embark on a career as a pianist."

In spite of this, it was not long before Krystian Zimerman had established himself within the front ranks of the leading pianists of his day, even if he has never seen himself as a "concert pianist", still less as an itinerant virtuoso. "However absurd it may sound, giving concerts is almost something of a by-product for me. First and foremost I am a 'music freak'. My real profession is studying music and living with scores." Krystian Zimerman regularly retires from the world to work on his own, a man possessed, turning night into day. "At night, I have peace and quiet; at night, time operates according to different rules; to work at night is fantastic. I suddenly sense this fever, I can't tear myself away from the piano, and the next thing I know is that it's already six in the morning. There's so much to do - and for me learning is a very slow process. I need ten years to prepare a piece properly."

This is also true of his new recording of Brahms's First Piano Concerto. He has listened to more than 80 different recordings of the work in an attempt to find what he considers the right tempo for it: "By this I don't mean a metronomic tempo; rather, it's something subjective, something that I might call the psychological perception of a tempo." This means that the "measurable" tempo may change in the course of an interpretation (and it may constantly be adapted to suit the character of the music), but these changes are not felt by the listener to break up the music, still less to amount to a surgical incision. "Everything must create the impression of a uniform flow."

There is no doubt that for Krystian Zimerman playing the piano is not an artificial or competitive sport concerned only with superficialities but is an inner process repeatedly interrupted by continuous reflection. This process can last for years, even decades, and may be concentrated on only a few works. "I can't help it. Above all, I can't make things easier for myself. At my concerts I play no more than ten percent of the repertoire on which I've been working. And of the works that I play in public, I record no more than ten percent." At the start of his meteoric career, Krystian Zimerman was generally hailed as a Chopin specialist, yet he has continuously expanded and deepened his repertory. And when he played for his famous compatriot, Artur Rubinstein, the latter - also a gifted interpreter of Chopin - observed spontaneously that Zimerman was in fact a Brahmsian.

Zimerman has had an intensive preoccupation with Brahms for decades. He began with the three piano sonatas, then moved on to the two piano concertos. And he has already recorded all these works, the two concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. That was a good 20 years ago. Asked what he thinks about these recordings now, Zimerman replies: "Every recording documents a single moment." The conditions in Vienna were far from ideal: "For the recording of the First Piano Concerto I was unable to get the instrument I wanted, as the van that was supposed to bring the piano from Italy was involved in an accident. The instrument that was finally placed at my disposal may well have been good for Mozart, but not for Brahms." Moreover, a video recording was made at the same time as the audio recordings, with the result that the whole concert hall was covered with a material that affected the acoustics. For the new recording - made in the Scoring Stage, Berlin because of its exceptional acoustics - Krystian Zimerman prepared his own piano. As Brahms noted on the occasion of the work's first performance, the nature, condition and individual qualities of the solo instrument are particularly important in this piece.
ending - death was not allowed on the stage. In their customary fashion Opera Rara gives you the opportunity to hear both endings. In fact, all of the music Donizetti wrote for subsequent productions is included in this comprehensive recording.