Word: brahmsian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rhapsody, Op. 119 No. 4 (Pianist Van Cliburn, RCA). The Handel Variations are often thought of as a piece that only a pianist, or piano buff, could love. In one of his most appealing albums in years, Van Cliburn puts the lie to that. Leaping from one craggy Brahmsian peak to another as effortlessly as though playing Debussy's Clair de lune, Cliburn gives the work a warm romantic allure yet never loses hold of its classic-baroque underpinnings. What ingenuity and surprise Cliburn finds in this music! What stunning sound-almost orchestral in its power and variety...
...different three-note chords (triads) that exist within the octave. String Quartet No. 3 is based on four-note chords, the Concerto for Orchestra on five-and seven-note chords. This music no more has a conventional beginning and ending or progression in time toward a Brahmsian climax than a de Kooning has an east or west...
...piece going; but as though afraid somebody would miss the point, the players retarded the tempo melodramatically, making the subsequent return to the more characteristic rhythmic motion of the piece seem awkward. In the second movement Haydn alternates sections of simple, broad melody (played in this case with a Brahmsian flavor), and mildly rhapsodic filigree (largely in the first violin part) which is given an ostinato accompaniment (sixteenth notes) marked both with dots and the written indication, "staccato." Only during the climax midway through the piece was this ostinato element performed according to the markings--elsewhere, these repeated notes were...
...bowed instruments) are responsible for a bizarre series of events leading to the cancellation of at least one concert this spring. (In attempting to compensate the distortion, a female pianist sprained her hand). And thus unhappily, the inner lines of the piano parts, which contain quite a bit of Brahmsian cross-rhythm and harmonic detail, were largely obscured. All violin and cello dynamics had to be raised one level, so that pianissimos were indelicate, and fortes often rasping. The overall result was a rather thick, monotonously undifferentiated texture most of the time...