Jakub Hrůša and Yuja Wang: Dvořák, Bartók and Brahms

About the Work

This short piece had two earlier lives before it found a permanent home. It began around 1870 as the slow movement, marked Andante religioso, of a String Quartet in E minor that Antonín Dvořák never published. A few years later he reused the music as a slow movement in his String Quintet in G major, then took it out of that work as well. Only in the early 1880s did he rework it as a piece in its own right, giving it the title Nocturne. It was published in 1883 as his Op. 40, and besides the version for string orchestra he prepared one for violin and piano and one for piano four hands.

The decade between the first idea and the finished piece had changed Dvořák’s life. In 1870 he was an unknown orchestral player in Prague. By 1883 the Slavonic Dances had carried his name abroad, and a publisher was ready to take even a nine-minute movement salvaged from an abandoned quartet. The sources disagree about where and when the orchestral version was first played, so the premiere is best left open.

What to Listen For

The Nocturne holds a single mood from beginning to end. After a brief, plain introduction, the upper strings begin a long, winding melody that moves in small steps over a gently pulsing accompaniment. Underneath it the basses hold one deep note, an F sharp, for a very long time. That held note is what gives the first part of the piece its feeling of suspense: the harmony seems to be waiting to resolve and never quite does. The main Czech reference site on the composer describes the effect as almost hypnotic.

Eventually the bass lets go, the music becomes more animated, and the texture opens out. The opening returns at the end, but the tension has gone, and the piece closes in calm.

About the Work

In 1926, after a period in which he had written very little, Béla Bartók produced a run of piano works in quick succession. The largest of them was his First Piano Concerto, composed in the autumn of that year. He wrote it for his own use: he was in demand across Europe as a pianist, and he wanted a concerto of his own to play. He gave the first performance himself on 1 July 1927 in Frankfurt, at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting.

The concerto shows a new manner. Bartók had been studying Baroque keyboard music, and the score is full of counterpoint: short motifs are passed around, imitated and stacked on top of one another. He had also been listening to Stravinsky, and the driving, irregular rhythm of the piece owes something to that example. What is entirely his own is the treatment of the piano as a percussion instrument. The soloist hammers out repeated notes and tight clusters of adjacent keys, and the orchestra’s drums answer in kind. Bartók wrote into the score that the percussion, including the timpani, must be placed directly beside the piano, so that the two form a single group. His publisher, Universal Edition, notes that the themes of all three movements grow from one small melodic cell, and that the simple, folk-like lines are deliberately set against harsh, chromatic harmony.

The critics at the first performance were hostile. The concerto has never become easy listening, and it remains extremely difficult for soloist and orchestra to hold together.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro moderato. The concerto begins quietly, with low rumbling from timpani, piano and brass. Out of this comes the idea that drives the whole movement: one note, struck again and again by the piano. The main Allegro piles up from there in octaves and syncopated orchestral chords. Listen for how often the piano and the drums seem to be finishing each other’s sentences.

II. Andante. The strings are silent throughout this movement. The piano is joined only by woodwinds, brass and percussion, which gives the music a bare, nocturnal colour. It opens as a quiet exchange between piano and drums; the winds enter one by one in the middle and build, over a repeating figure in the piano, to a harsh climax before the opening returns.

III. Allegro molto. The finale follows without a break, launched by drums and sliding trombones. It is a fast, stamping dance dominated by piano and percussion, with the brass punctuating. A short, angry fugal passage interrupts near the end, and the concerto stops abruptly, at full speed.

About the Work

In the autumn of 1857 the 24-year-old Johannes Brahms took up a post at the small court of Detmold, obtained on the recommendation of Clara Schumann. He taught the piano to a princess, conducted the choir and, most usefully, had the run of a court orchestra. It was his first regular contact with one. The ensemble played Haydn and Mozart as well as newer music, and Brahms used his time to study their symphonies, serenades and divertimenti closely.

The Serenade in D major came out of that study. Brahms began it in 1858 as a piece for nine players, a mixed group of winds and strings in the spirit of an eighteenth-century divertimento. It then grew: first he enlarged it for chamber orchestra, and finally, with advice from his friend the violinist Joseph Joachim, he rescored it for full orchestra, finishing in December 1859. Joachim conducted the first performance of that version in Hanover on 3 March 1860. By Brahms’s own account the large audience applauded warmly, a happier reception than the First Piano Concerto, written in the same years, had met at its first hearings.

Brahms would not complete a symphony until 1876, when he was 43, weighed down as he felt by the example of Beethoven. The two serenades were his way of learning to write for orchestra without yet claiming that title. The First is nevertheless a large piece: six movements lasting about three quarters of an hour, with a first movement in full sonata form and a long slow movement that would not be out of place in a symphony. Around them Brahms keeps the older serenade tradition alive with two scherzos and a pair of minuets.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro molto. Low strings set up a drone, like a bagpipe, and a horn plays a cheerful, rustic tune over it. The opening closely resembles the finale of Haydn’s last symphony, No. 104, which is in the same key and begins over the same kind of drone. The movement is broad and sunny, and the horns stay prominent throughout.

II. Scherzo: Allegro non troppo. A shadowy movement in D minor, quiet and restless, with a warmer middle section in B flat major.

III. Adagio non troppo. The longest movement and the centre of the work, in B flat major. It unfolds slowly, with long melodies for the woodwinds and horn over murmuring strings.

IV. Menuetto I and II. Two tiny minuets, the first in G major and the second in G minor, scored for only a few instruments. This is the movement where the serenade’s origin as chamber music is easiest to hear.

V. Scherzo: Allegro. A short, boisterous movement led by the horns.

VI. Rondo: Allegro. The finale is built on a bouncing, dotted rhythm that keeps returning between contrasting episodes, and it ends the work in high spirits.