Hungarian Dance No. 5

Program notes

About the Work

As a young man, Johannes Brahms toured northern Germany as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, and it was from Reményi that he absorbed the flamboyant ‘gypsy’ style of Hungarian popular music: the csárdás with its slow, brooding opening and its whirlwind fast section, the sudden rubatos, the dazzling ornamentation. Years later, Brahms turned these memories into a set of Hungarian Dances for piano duet (piano four hands), the domestic music-making of every middle-class household of the day. The first two books appeared in 1869 and became some of the most popular and profitable music he ever published; two further books followed in 1880, making twenty-one dances in all.

Brahms was careful to call them arrangements rather than original compositions, which is why they carry no opus number. Several of the tunes were not in fact anonymous folk melodies but recent popular compositions: the famous Fifth, for instance, is based on a csárdás by the Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, which Brahms apparently believed to be traditional. Brahms himself orchestrated only three of the dances. No. 5, the most famous of them all, is played tonight in Albert Parlow’s orchestration, in a version the orchestra credits to Parlow and Jansons.

What to Listen For

This is a dance built on contrast and caprice. The opening is a passionate, swaggering minor-key melody, full of dark colour, which the orchestra plays with exaggerated freedom; listen for the sudden slowings and stretchings of the tempo, the hallmark of the Hungarian style. Then the central section flips into the major, with quicksilver changes of speed: a sudden dead slow, a sudden rush, the music teasing the listener like a dancer who cannot decide whether to stop or to spin. The opening tune returns to round the whole thing off, all in barely three minutes.