SKU: BR.OB-3210-15

ISBN 9790004300695. 10 x 12.5 inches.

Johannes Brahms' first Piano Concerto was the fruit of a complex, protracted, and extremely trying creative process. Its origin goes back to a sonata in D minor for two pianos conceived in spring 1854. The impulse for the creation of the main subject was however a shocking event: According to Joseqph Joachim, the theme originated after hearing about Schumanns suicide attempt. A few months earlier, Schumann had revealed Brahms to the musical world in his essay New Paths. In this article, Brahms is extolled as the musician who is called to give expression to the feeling of his times in an ideal fashion. The unusually rapid genesis of the D-minor sonata and its prevailingly dark, monumental mood can be interpreted as an impassioned compositional response to Schumann's suicide attempt. However, the year-long struggle to arrive at the final form of the work should perhaps also be seen in the context of the resounding praise of Schumann's prophetic article. Brahms undoubtly felt a growing inner pressure to live up to the expectations aroused therein.Together with Clara Schumann, Brahms played the three so far existing movements of the sonata, but he was very self-critical. He felt that he had not been able to realize the monumentality he had envisioned, and which Clara Schumann felt, by merely doubling the piano sound. He soon decided to transform the sonata into a symphony (his first orchestral project). However, this idea did not seem to fit his vision either. Only in spring 1855 did he strike upon the definitive solution: a piano concerto. With Brahms as soloist, this concerto premiered in 1859, though he initially had little success. He wrote to Joachim about one of the first performances that the concerto was a brilliant and unmistakable - failure. This hardly surprised Brahms, for he was undoubtedly aware of the newness of the work, which surpassed the expectations of the audience. The work's complex structure and symphonic dimensions, the solo part's rejection of showy, elegant brilliance, and the uniquely Brahmsian orchestral density it maintains throughout; all of these qualities inevitably exasperated audiences at first - until they raised this work to the ranks of the most celebrated concertos of all time.

SKU: BR.OB-3210-16

ISBN 9790004300701. 10 x 12.5 inches.

Johannes Brahms' first Piano Concerto was the fruit of a complex, protracted, and extremely trying creative process. Its origin goes back to a sonata in D minor for two pianos conceived in spring 1854. The impulse for the creation of the main subject was however a shocking event: According to Joseqph Joachim, the theme originated after hearing about Schumanns suicide attempt. A few months earlier, Schumann had revealed Brahms to the musical world in his essay New Paths. In this article, Brahms is extolled as the musician who is called to give expression to the feeling of his times in an ideal fashion. The unusually rapid genesis of the D-minor sonata and its prevailingly dark, monumental mood can be interpreted as an impassioned compositional response to Schumann's suicide attempt. However, the year-long struggle to arrive at the final form of the work should perhaps also be seen in the context of the resounding praise of Schumann's prophetic article. Brahms undoubtly felt a growing inner pressure to live up to the expectations aroused therein.Together with Clara Schumann, Brahms played the three so far existing movements of the sonata, but he was very self-critical. He felt that he had not been able to realize the monumentality he had envisioned, and which Clara Schumann felt, by merely doubling the piano sound. He soon decided to transform the sonata into a symphony (his first orchestral project). However, this idea did not seem to fit his vision either. Only in spring 1855 did he strike upon the definitive solution: a piano concerto. With Brahms as soloist, this concerto premiered in 1859, though he initially had little success. He wrote to Joachim about one of the first performances that the concerto was a brilliant and unmistakable - failure. This hardly surprised Brahms, for he was undoubtedly aware of the newness of the work, which surpassed the expectations of the audience. The work's complex structure and symphonic dimensions, the solo part's rejection of showy, elegant brilliance, and the uniquely Brahmsian orchestral density it maintains throughout; all of these qualities inevitably exasperated audiences at first - until they raised this work to the ranks of the most celebrated concertos of all time.

SKU: TM.06612SC

Transposed: Hn 1-4, Tpt 1+2, Tbn 1+2. Clothbound score.

SKU: PR.11641737S

ISBN 9781491136133. UPC: 680160688432.

Son et lumière (“sound and light,” a kind of show staged for tourists at historic sites or famous buildings) is an orchestral entertainment whose subject is the play of colors, bright surfaces, and shimmery textures. I have tried in this music to recapture the élan and immediacy that regular meters and repetitive rhythms make possible—something forbidden during the modernist regime but recently restored in the post-modern work of composers like John Adams, Steve Reich, and others. Throughout its brief nine-minute span, then, the piece is built almost exclusively of short, busy ostinato figures—my attempt, I suppose, to achieve the rhythmic vitality of minimalism, but without giving in to the over-simple harmonic language that usually comes with it.Surprisingly, the musical materials seemed determined to shape themselves into an approximation of nineteenth-century sonata form. We hear an introduction, a first theme (based on triadic broken chords), a second theme (beginning with the flute solo), and a closing theme (led by two piccolos). In a sort of development section, these materials are recombined in new ways; in a recapitulation, both the first and second themes are recalled more or less intact (part of the second is actually repeated quite literally).Then, in the coda, a second surprise: as if another, different music has been lurking all the while behind the shiny surface, the strings now unexpectedly split off from the rest of the orchestra to assert a new, more passionate, more “serious” voice, transcending the external show of sound and light.Son et lumière, commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, was composed between June and December 1988 in Ithaca (N.Y.), in Los Angeles, and at the artists’ colony Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs (N.Y.). David Zinman conducted the first performance in Baltimore on 18 May 1989; André Previn gave the West Coast premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on 18 January, 1990.
Son et lumière (“sound and light,” a kind of show staged for tourists at historic sites or famous buildings) is an orchestral entertainment whose subject is the play of colors, bright surfaces, and shimmery textures. I have tried in this music to recapture the élan and immediacy that regular meters and repetitive rhythms make possible—something forbidden during the modernist regime but recently restored in the post-modern work of composers like John Adams, Steve Reich, and others. Throughout its brief nine-minute span, then, the piece is built almost exclusively of short, busy ostinato figures—my attempt, I suppose, to achieve the rhythmic vitality of minimalism, but without giving in to the over-simple harmonic language that usually comes with it.Surprisingly, the musical materials seemed determined to shape themselves into an approximation of nineteenth-century sonata form. We hear an introduction, a first theme (based on triadic broken chords), a second theme (beginning with the flute solo), and a closing theme (led by two piccolos). In a sort of development section, these materials are recombined in new ways; in a recapitulation, both the first and second themes are recalled more or less intact (part of the second is actually repeated quite literally).Then, in the coda, a second surprise: as if another, different music has been lurking all the while behind the shiny surface, the strings now unexpectedly split off from the rest of the orchestra to assert a new, more passionate, more “serious” voice, transcending the external show of sound and light.Son et lumière, commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, was composed between June and December 1988 in Ithaca (N.Y.), in Los Angeles, and at the artists’ colony Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs (N.Y.). David Zinman conducted the first performance in Baltimore on 18 May 1989; André Previn gave the West Coast premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on 18 January, 1990.