courtesy of [Integral]
One week from today Hyperion will release what I believe is the third album of Garrick Ohlsson playing the solo piano music by Johannes Brahms. The series began in January of 2019 with an album devoted almost entirely to the late piano works. This was followed in October of 2010 with a two-CD album of all of the variations compositions. The new release presents the first two piano sonatas, Opus 1 in C major and Opus 2 in F-sharp minor, concluding with the two Opus 79 rhapsodies in B minor and G minor, respectively. As usual, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new offering.
The release of the first album also marked the launch of a series of four recitals that Ohlsson would take on tour. Here in San Francisco those recitals were presented by San Francisco Performances, taking place in Herbst Theatre. This site covered the first three of those recitals, which took place on February 21, 2019, March 28, 2019, and February 5, 2020. The final recital was planned for March 31, 2020 but had to be postponed due to COVID-19. Fortunately, at the end of last month, SFP announced that Ohlsson would complete his Brahms cycle in Herbst next month on July 15.
That program will include the Opus 1 sonata, which made for a seriously large-scale “debut” effort by the composer. The technical demands are so imposing that one can easily guess that Brahms was concerned as much with showing off his virtuosity as a pianist he was in launching his career as a composer with a prodigious undertaking. Listening to this sonata is just as much a major effort, making the timing for the release of Ohlsson’s latest album particularly apposite.
Since the new album couples Opus 1 with Opus 2, the listening experience is even more intense. Both sonatas were begun in 1852, when Brahms was in his late teens. Opus 2 seems to have been completed first, and Opus 1 was not finished until the following year. Brahms had made his first contact with Robert Schumann in 1850; but, at that time, he made little impression. Things changed in 1853, however, when Brahms plays some of his solo piano compositions for the violinist Joseph Joachim. That led to Joachim writing to Schumann as an advocate for Brahms. The second encounter of Brahms which Schumann was much more beneficial for both on them; and Schumann’s endorsement led to Brahms’ first publications, which included the two piano sonatas.
Ohlsson’s approach to both sonatas involves establishing just the right balance between technical dexterity and a capacity for expressiveness whose enthusiasm needs to be kept in check. When he performed the Opus 2 sonata at the second recital in his series, I wrote that “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.” That assessment is probably just as valid for Opus 1, but I shall have to wait until next month to put that speculation to the test!
The Opus 79 rhapsodies that conclude the album amount to a refreshing light dessert in the wake of two massive courses of fish and meat, respectively. (Deciding which sonata is associated with which course will be left as an exercise for the reader!) This was the selection that began Ohlsson’s third program, which concluded with the Opus 5 piano sonata in F minor, another 1853 composition. In other words, as a recitalist, Ohlsson selected Opus 79 to “warm up” the audience, while the album ordering suggests that the rhapsodies “cool things down” after all the flamboyant virtuosity in the sonatas. Mind you, there is no shortage of expressiveness in Opus 79, but by 1879 Brahms had begun to appreciate the virtues of holding at least some of his emotional dispositions in check!
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