Pina Napolitano Revisits “Progressive” Brahms

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the end of last month, Odradek Records released its latest album of Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. This was her second recording entitled Brahms the Progressive. The first “volume” in this project was released almost exactly four years earlier; like most (but not all) of her recordings, it was a solo album. The new release consists of two instrumental concertos, with most of the program devoted to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major. It is preceded only by Anton Webern’s Opus 24, entitled “Concerto for Nine Instruments.” It would probably be unfair to call the piano the solo concertante instrument. It would be fairer to say that it “performs on a level playing field” with solo parts for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, and viola. The instrumental ensemble for both selections is the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas.

Napolitano’s first album in this series consisted of what could be called a “nested” program. It began with the six piano pieces in Brahms’ Opus 118 and concluded with the four in Opus 119. Nested between these compositions were two Webern sets. Opus 118 was followed by two early works, neither of which received an opus number; and Opus 119 was preceded by the Opus 27 variations. At the “core” of the program was Alban Berg’s Opus 1 single-movement sonata.

That nested structure was decidedly more elaborate than the “after-before” program of the new release. However, it is important to bear in mind that the Brahms concerto is a major undertaking unto itself. Back in the days of “long-playing” vinyls, it would fill an entire album with no room to spare. In that context the inclusion of the Webern concerto was a matter of fortuitous “packaging.” However, it also represented a “semantic interpretation” of the concept of concerto that differed radically from just about every concerto that preceded it in music history (not to mention the many that followed it).

Would it have been better to present the two concertos in chronological order? Personally, I think not. Opus 83 is as exhaustive an undertaking for the listener as it is for the performer. By the time the fourth movement has concluded, mind has little attention for anything more. Instead, the listener to this album as a whole is greeted with an interplay of syntactic ambiguity and the sonorous diversity of nine distinct instruments. One emerges from that ambiguity to enter the much more secure framework of symphonic structures, all basically ternary in nature. This makes for a more satisfying sense of overall conclusion, hopefully without obliterating any memories of how the journey began.

Perhaps what is most important is that, as a conductor, Pitrėnas brings as much clarity to Webern’s ambiguities as he brings to the overall architecture of Brahms’ concerto. Thus, while there is no shortage of satisfying recordings of the Opus 83 concerto, none of them offer the contextual framework established by the “program” that Napolitano designed for the album. Like the first Brahms the Progressive release, this album encourages the attentive listener to appreciate the emergence of a fault line between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Now that we, as listeners, have advanced to yet another century, we can appreciate a “vantage point” from which we can experience the nature of that transition.