Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented the third of the four recitals that pianist Garrick Ohlsson prepared to present all the solo piano compositions of Johannes Brahms. Almost the entirety of that canon imposes prodigiously virtuosic demands on any pianist; and last night’s program provided Ohlsson with little, if any, opportunities to refresh his strength other than the intermission break and the few moments when he left the stage between selections. Nevertheless, he prevailed throughout the entire program, bringing a commanding presence to his conquest of the many technical demands Brahms had imposed and highlighting that presence with an impressive variety of rhetorical turns.
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the Opus 5 (third) piano sonata in F minor. This sonata is in five movements, structured in an arch form that may well have inspired Gustav Mahler’s organization of some of his symphonies. The Scherzo movement is at the center of the arch, flanked on either side by Andante movements, the second of which amounts to a retrospective reflection on the first. The first and last movements, in turn, are energetic Allegro affairs. The overall duration is usually about half an hour.
Brahms was only twenty years old when he completed this sonata. However, there is far more to the music than an outburst of youthful energy. There are no end of elegant structural details, most of which demonstrate the skill with which Brahms could manage elaborate polyphony in the context of imaginative harmonic progressions. One might accuse the composer of excessive personal preening; but, given that there is not a single note wasted in this youthful outpouring of thematic material, it is hard to dismiss this young composer as a mere show-off.
So it was that Ohlsson threw both superior technical command and a refined sensitivity of expression into this Great White Whale of piano sonatas. The results could not have been more stimulating. Ohlsson clearly appreciated the value of every phrase Brahms had summoned, and he delivered each of those phrases within his own distinctive rhetorical framework. The result was an execution that was rich in signification without dismissing the need to take technical command of every single phrase.
Among many the Opus 5 sonata is known for little other than notoriety. Many pianists give it a wide berth to avoid a fools-rush-in reaction. Others persist in nailing down every technical challenge with little attention to bringing much expression to their conquering gestures. Ohlsson clearly understands the “middle road” between these fruitless extremes; and, hopefully, he left last night’s audience with an appreciation of the many virtues one encounters beneath the bombast on the surface.
The offerings on the first half of the program were just as challenging but in different ways. For technical flamboyance Ohlsson played the second book in the Opus 35 set of variations on Niccolò Paganini’s 24th caprice for solo violin in A minor. (He played the first book during his first Brahms recital a little less than a year ago.)
For a foretaste of the intense expressiveness in the Opus 5 sonata, Ohlsson turned to the two Opus 79 rhapsodies, the first in B minor and the second in G minor. Indeed, the entire program was framed by Opus 79 at the beginning and Opus 5 as the conclusion. Opus 79 reflects many of those passionate outbursts unleashed in Opus 5; but they have now been refined down to much briefer durations, each in the vicinity of about six minutes in duration. As in Opus 5, Ohlsson had no trouble putting his own rhetorical stamp on his interpretations of these two rhapsodies.
The remaining work on the program was the Opus 116 collection of seven pieces called “fantasies” in the title of the publication. Three of the individual pieces were labeled as capriccios and the other four were marked as intermezzos. Between 1892 and 1893 Brahms composed and published four such collections of short pieces, most in ternary form; and Opus 116 was the first of those publications. Each composition can be taken as a vignette of personal expression, and Ohlsson skillfully teased out the individual “personality” of the individual selections.
Given the content of the program, I was a bit surprised that Ohlsson had enough energy to give an encore. However, he quickly explained that his encore would not be another Brahms composition! Instead, he chose to play the music of a young composer that had met the aged Brahms. That composer turned out to be Claude Debussy, represented by “Clair de lune” from his Suite bergamasque, allowing calm to settle over all the tumult of the Brahms selections.
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