Garrick Ohlsson’s Second All-Brahms Recital

1894 photograph of Johannes Brahms (right) with Johan Strauss II in Vienna (photograph by Rudolf Krziwanek, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Last night pianist Garrick Ohlsson returned to Herbst Theatre to present his second recital devoted to the music of Johannes Brahms with the promise of two more all-Brahms recitals to be performed during the 2019–2020 Piano Series presented by San Francisco Performances. Last night’s program was organized around the earliest and latest years of Brahms career. The program was “bookended” by two extended early compositions, beginning with the Opus 2 sonata in F-sharp minor, composed in 1853, and concluding with the 1861 Opus 24 variations and fugue on a theme by George Frideric Handel. The “core” of the program then consisted to two collections of short pieces. The six Opus 118 pieces, composed in 1893, preceded the intermission, which was followed by the three Opus 117 intermezzi, composed in 1892.

Last night Opus 24 was definitely the most stunning of the many jewels in the program’s crown. The theme is taken from Handel’s HWV 434 keyboard suite in B-flat major, and Brahms maintained that key in his own setting, followed by 25 variations that survey a wide diversity of approaches to variation (a few of which are strikingly remote), concluding with over six pages of fugue, most of which involve free-form approaches to counterpoint but none of which abandon the fugue subject for very long. Technically, Brahms established highly imaginative ways of approaching the theme, often concealing it within layers of sophisticated embellishment. Fortunately, Ohlsson clearly never lost track of the theme’s presence; and his execution of the variations made that presence just as clear to the attentive listener capable of sorting out foreground embellishment from the core of the background.

The four movements of Opus 2 are also rich with the interplay of foreground and background, but each movement is a bit like a roulette table where Brahms puts all of his chips on a single number and then lets the wheel spin. Nevertheless, through just the right combination of disciplined technical skill and almost unbridled expressiveness, the ball always seems to drop in just the right number. Most disruptive is the attacca transition from the second (Andante con espressione, where “espressione” deserves to be italicized) movement to the following Scherzo, almost as if Brahms had impetuously decided that he had had enough of that “espressione” rhetoric. The fact is that Brahms had not quite gotten his head around working with large-scale composition; but, through Ohlsson’s perceptive interpretation, the attentive listener could appreciate the architecture that the composer envisaged, even if the building blocks did always not fit together with the best precision.

These days the late short pieces receive far much more attention than the early three multi-movement sonatas. Yes, the balance between intricacy of structure and expressiveness of rhetoric is much more refined. Nevertheless, the way in which Ohlsson organized his program revealed some traces of the continuity by which those late pieces could be seen to have grown from the seeds of the earlier ones.

This is particularly the case with the three Opus 117 intermezzi, which follow each other in an overall design that almost seems to be seeking out a new approach to those multi-movement sonatas. Ohlsson seemed to grasp that sense of an underlying unity in his approach to performing this set as a whole (in contrast the many pianists who prefer to pick and choose their favorites from the full canon of those short pieces). In his approach to Opus 118, on the other hand, Ohlsson seemed to focus on individuality over unity; but his overall rhetoric clearly honored the way in which Brahms decided that the ending of each piece should flow smoothly into the beginning of the next.

As was the case a little over a month ago, Ohlsson turned to Frédéric Chopin for his only encore selection (this time without any jokes about Chopin having written very early Brahms music). This time the selection was the second of the three Opus 64 waltzes, written in the key of C-sharp minor. Since this came on the heels of a night at the ballet, it was hard to suppress memories of Les Sylphides. However, Ohlsson approached the second theme with what felt like a gentle sense of whimsy, reminding me of how the late choreographer James Waring had set that music to the clapping game of pat-a-cake. Perhaps, for my own listening, this was just an echo of some of the more whimsical approaches to variation in Opus 24!