Buchbinder speaks of Brahms’s piano concertos with an authority based on a career spanning over 60 years and his familiarity with Brahms’s own manuscripts.
“I try to interpret the piece as it is written. These pieces are hundreds of years old, why should we find something new.”
“There was an uproar among the public and critics. The reviews were exceptionally harsh, and one critic suggested that I be locked up in a mental hospital and that they should make sure that I don’t have any sheet music.” Arnold Schoenberg’s description of the premiere of his tone poem Pelléas and Mélisande arouses curiosity. In music history, the work is described as the last gasp of the Romantic era.
The career of composer Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) got off to a flying start when Robert Schumann declared him to be the next great name in symphonic music, a new Beethoven. This tribute was premature and had an unfortunate impact: although Brahms was an undeniable virtuoso, his merits as a composer up to that time included only what might be described as kindling for firing up his performing career: sonatas, solo songs and chamber music. Schumann’s praise heaped unreasonable pressure on the emerging young musician, and Brahms struggled with this until he actually completed a symphony — more than 20 years later.
Brahms wrote several works based on material that he originally intended to make into a symphony. The earliest of these is the Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor (1858). It was initially supposed to be a sonata for two pianos. Brahms began writing it in 1854, soon after Schumann had been dragged out of the river Rhine and committed to a mental asylum. When Schumann’s death began to seem inevitable, Brahms decided to convert the sonata into a symphony, as a sort of parting gift to his friend and mentor. This plan proved too ambitious to be sustained, but in the end the stuff of this sonata/symphony emerged as perhaps the most symphonic piano concerto ever written.
The concerto is in three movements, and its tumultuous nature mirrors Brahms’s mental turmoil. The first movement captures the anguish caused by Schumann’s attempted suicide by drowning and his subsequent death. The second movement is a warm-hearted love letter to his widow, Clara Schumann. The finale evokes the shadow of Beethoven, with which Brahms had only just begun to come to grips.
The magnum opus of Belgian Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) is the play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893), a subdued love-triangle tragedy dominated by tense atmospheres and significant gestures rather than dramatic twists and turns. The play met with a lukewarm reception from the press and at the box office but was later recognised as a cornerstone of the Symbolist movement. It inspired a number of composers: Gabriel Fauré (1898) and Jean Sibelius (1905) wrote incidental music for it, Claude Debussy turned it into an opera (1902), and Alexandre Desplat (2013) wrote a Flute Concerto based on the narrative.
Pelléas ja Mélisande op. 5 (1903) by Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) represents his early period, where tonal harmony was being pushed to its limits but not yet completely exploded. Maeterlinck’s brooding, meandering text translates into a tense dramatic arc: Golaud finds Mélisande in the forest and marries her, but she falls in love with his stepbrother Pelléas. Having found the two in flagrante delicto, Golaud kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande, who later dies giving birth to a baby girl.
The work is in a single movement, but Schönberg’s pupil Alban Berg identified four sections. The first is about the forest, Golaud and Mélisande’s wedding and her ardent love. The second section is at the fountain where Mélisande loses her wedding ring and at the tower where Pelléas falls in love with Mélisande’s hair. The third section begins as a love scene but ends with the death of Pelléas, and the final section ebbs towards Mélisande’s death.
Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, has established himself as one of the outstanding conductors of his generation. Born in Finland in 1956, he began his career as a violinist. Today, he is renowned as an artist of exceptional versatility and breadth.
Saraste has previously held principal conductorships at the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and has served as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. As a guest conductor, he appears with major orchestras worldwide, including the Orchestre de Paris, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Symphony Orchestras of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Coaching and mentoring young musicians is of great importance to Saraste. He is a founding member of the LEAD! Foundation, a mentorship programme for young conductors and soloists.
“Music has never stopped fascinating me. And even after all these decades there are still some works, including works that I have heard many times and played even more frequently, that have the notorious “goose bumps passages”, moments that touch and stir you as much as ever. This also includes the F major passage in the first movement of Brahms’ D Minor Piano Concerto.”
Rudolf Buchbinder (b. 1946) is one of the legendary performers of our time. The authority based on a career spanning more than 60 years is uniquely combined with esprit and spontaneity in his piano playing. He has performed the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven in cycles all over the world more than 60 times.
Buchbinder attaches great importance to historical music sources. His private collection of sheet music includes 39 different editions of Beethoven's complete piano sonatas, and for example copies of the autograph piano parts of both piano concertos by Johannes Brahms.
Rudolf Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
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