Brahms++ from Schiff and Widmann on ECM

Jörg Widmann and András Schiff (photograph by Fritz Etzold for ECM Records, courtesy of Crossover Media)

This past October ECM released its latest album of performances by pianist András Schiff. Schiff shares the recording with Jörg Widmann, who serves in two capacities, both of which involve music composed by Johannes Brahms near the end of his life. As a clarinetist, Widmann joins Schiff to play the two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas. Between these two offerings, Widmann appears as the composer of “Intermezzi,” music for solo piano played by Schiff. That title reflects on the last collections of short pieces for piano, Opp. 116–119; and many of those pieces were given the title “Intermezzo.”

It is worth noting that the “program” for the album begins with the second, in the key of E-flat major, of the Opus 120 sonatas, saving the first, in the key of F minor, for the conclusion. One should not be misled by the mode labels, however. The E-flat major sonata is the more melancholy of the two. While the other sonata begins in F minor, progresses into A-flat major for the two middle movements, and concludes with a sunlit Vivace rondo in F major.

Schiff and Widmann have been playing these sonatas together for at least a decade, featuring them in a recital they performed at the 2010 Salzburg Festival. Indeed, that recital also marked the premiere performance of Widmann’s “Intermezzi,” which can be interpreted as a musical portrait of the aged Brahms, at least in the approach that Schiff took to presenting Widmann’s score. It may be worth noting that Brahms died about a month before his 64th birthday, meaning that both the clarinet sonatas and the “late” collections of solo piano music were written in his early sixties. In our own terms Brahms would probably not be regarded as “aged.” Indeed, Schiff himself was 64 years old when the selections on this album were recorded in May of 2018.

Widmann’s composition is structured as a somewhat eccentric arch in five movements. The middle movement is about twelve minutes in duration, significantly longer than any of the other four movements. Indeed, the first movement lasts only about 45 seconds, followed by a movement whose duration is a minute and a half. The final two movements are somewhat longer, four and one-quarter minutes and ten seconds short of two minutes. Those familiar with Brahms’ music will recognize an abundance of familiar motifs that fill these five movements, and Widmann is particularly imaginative in fitting those phrases into a basically atonal framework. Considering that Heinz Holliger dedicated his 1999 solo piano partita to Schiff, there should be no doubt that Schiff is as comfortable with atonality as he is with nineteenth-century harmonic progressions.

When one considers this album as a whole, one is likely to be struck by just how different are the rhetorical stances taken by the two Brahms sonatas. In that context Widmann’s composition, which reflects on nineteenth-century rhetoric while working with atonal syntax, can be taken as a “spacer” between the two sonatas. As a result, there is much to be gained from approaching the entire album as a single, albeit far-reaching, journey; and there are no end of ways to gain satisfaction from that approach.