Leif Ove Andsnes has a reputation for innovative thinking in both the music he selects for performance and his interpretations of those selections. This reputation continues in the program he has arranged for his United States recital tour at the beginning of April. He will offer the same program at all stops on that tour, but it promises to be an intensive investigation of creative minds at work.
Andsnes has chose to present Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 19, entitled “Sechs kleine Klavierstücke,” in the context of two of that composer’s strongest influences, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Beethoven will provide the “bookends” for the program, which begins with the Opus 53 sonata in C major (best known as the “Waldstein”) and ends with his final sonata, Opus 111 in C minor. Brahms will “mediate” between Beethoven and Schoenberg with the four Opus 10 ballades.
One might say that each of these works provides a significant data point in any narrative account of its respective composer finding his voice. Opus 53 was not Beethoven’s first departure of conventional sonata architecture, but it came at a time of several firm assertions that the old order would be giving way to the new. Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s biography has Beethoven composing it between the fall of 1803 and 1804, which is significant when we bear in mind that the Opus 55 E-flat major symphony (“Eroica”) was completed at the beginning of 1804. Indeed, the initial sketches for this sonata are in the same notebook that Beethoven used while working on Opus 55. (This was also the period when Beethoven experimented with the idea of a concerto for piano trio and orchestra, synthesizing two major genres in a single package, so to speak.) We may thus associate Opus 53 with shaking things up for the solo pianist as Opus 55 was shaking things up for the symphony orchestra (not to mention the audiences for these performers).
Where the solo piano repertoire was concerned, shaking things up was, for Beethoven, a bit like eating potato chips. Once he started, he could never really stop; and he was clearly at it in Opus 111 with the same intensity he had brought to Opus 53. This sonata has only two movements. In the first we find Beethoven continuing to push the envelope of imitative counterpoint while honoring the formal structure of an opening sonata movement. From there, however, he turns to his favorite exercise in diversity, variations on a theme, taking a subject already rife with prolongation and following a prodigious number of paths to prolong it further. The result is a journey that never fails to present the listener with new insights, no matter how many performances one has experienced.
When we turn to Andsnes’ Brahms selection, we are confronted by the popular question of whether Brahms was “haunted by Beethoven’s shadow” or simply wrestling with how to accept a passing torch. The Opus 10 ballades were preceded by three piano sonatas, each of which was conceived and executed on a monumental scale; and the opening gesture of the first of these sonatas was a clear recognition of the opening gesture of Beethoven’s Opus 106 in B-flat major (“Hammerklavier”). This led to the often-repeated anecdote that, when someone confronted Brahms with this similarity of his music to Beethoven’s, Brahms replied “Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel” (any ass can see that)!
In this context the significance of Opus 10 is that the four ballades constitute Brahms’ first effort to work on a smaller scale. That scale would serve him particularly well in his later compositions for piano solo. However, in calling these compositions “ballads,” we see a mind toying with the idea that one might bring a mindset to the composition of piano music that had previously been applied to art song.
If we then think of the progression from Beethoven to Brahms as one in which expression begins to become “compacted” into shorter, but still intense, durations, we find ourselves going down a path that leads almost inevitably to Schoenberg’s Opus 19. It is often argued that Schoenberg drastically reduced his time scale to facilitate his experimenting with “the emancipation of the dissonance;” but this is only part of the story. Opus 19 was composed in 1911, the same year in which Schoenberg was revising the score for the monumental proportions of his Gurre-Lieder; so it is at least viable to hypothesize that there would be the coupling of a break from tonality with a break from the massive architectures (such as those of Gustav Mahler) that had come to accommodate tonal composition. Looking in the other direction, the miniaturization of Opus 19 would have its own influence on Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern, whose almost microscopic six bagatelles for string quartet would be composed in 1913.
Andsnes has thus prepared a highly thought-provoking program for his next American tour. The only downside is that he will only perform in four times:
- On April 1 in Jordan Hall in Boston, Massachusetts
- On April 3 at Symphony Hall in Chicago, Illinois
- On April 5 at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
- On April 7 at Carnegie Hall in New York, New York
Chicago residents will also have the luxury of hearing him perform Brahms’ second piano concerto (Opus 83 in B-flat major) with the Chicago Symphony under Riccardo Muti during the February 17 week of their subscription concerts. The rest of us, alas, will have to wait for future opportunities to hear this extraordinarily imaginative pianist.
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