Piano Sonata No.2 in F sharp minor, Op.2 [28:43]
Variations on an Original Theme, Op.21 No.1 [19:57]
Three Intermezzi, Op.117 [17:55]
Scherzo in E flat minor, Op.4 [8:16]
Jonathan Plowright (piano)
rec. January 2014, Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK
BIS BIS-2117 SACD [76:24]
Well, you wait years for a single disc recording of Brahms’s early
Sonata No. 2, then two superb accounts of it come along at once. Barry
Douglas’s version, on volume three of his continuing Chandos survey
of all the Brahms solo piano music, has impressed the critics, and seemed
to me the best since Katchen and Arrau. Plowright has perhaps also embarked
upon an intégrale, since this is his second solo Brahms volume
for BIS.
In the Sonata No.2 Plowright is at some points more extreme in tempo than
Barry Douglas, with a very swift first movement: his 5:34 the quickest
since Katchen’s 5:29. No-one else comes in below six minutes and
Douglas takes 6:12. Conversely Plowright’s slow movement is very
slow. That andante con espressione has plenty of expression,
but takes 6:56 against Douglas’s 6:19, though the expressive effect
is broadly similar. Older versions have more of a true walking pace and
less of a trudge - Martin Jones: 4:43, Richter: 5:12, Arrau: 5:19, Katchen:
6:00. There is a point to all this timing listing, namely that the consensus
has been that the movement should have a sense of onward flow. Richter’s
tempo (from a live performance), always feels just right and preferable
to any of the six minute plus accounts. The rest of the sonata is superb
in Plowright’s hands, and overall this can stand alongside the Douglas
version as making a compelling case for this most neglected of Brahms’
large-scale piano pieces. If I prefer Douglas’s tempi for the first
two movements, it must be said that Plowright’s more extreme tempi
(in both directions) does give the music an exploratory Lisztian feel
— very much in tune with the 1850s Zeitgeist.
There can be no quibbles about the rest of the disc. The rare Variations
Op.21/1 is as satisfying as any version I know, and may even be preferable
to that in the splendid complete set of all Brahms’ piano variations
from Garrick Ohlsson on Hyperion. Plowright unfurls the lovely D major
theme in a most ingratiating way, and compels the attention throughout
the ensuing variations. The disc closes with the Scherzo Op.4, written
when the composer was only 18, and his earliest piano piece to survive.
It is a calling-card good enough to impress Schumann and Liszt when he
took it to them. They would surely have noted its slightly mischievous,
Mephisto-like quality. Certainly there is a whiff of sulphur in Plowright’s
wonderfully adroit handling of its spectral elements here.
As a contrast to all this music of the young Romantic of the 1850s we
also get the much loved Op.117 set of three intermezzi from 1892, when
the ambitious “veiled symphonies” that Schumann heard in those
large-scale early sonatas had long been succeeded by successive publications
of shorter works. The piano had switched from being his means of taking
on the world to, at least in Op. 117, a source of solace or intimate communion.
These pieces held some personal meaning for the composer who, though hardly
a personality given to confessional statements, called them “the
lullaby of all my griefs”. The phrase illuminates the emotional
ambiguity of the music, since a lullaby is meant to comfort, so that the
grief is simultaneously expressed and assuaged. Plowright catches this
mood precisely, with tempi and phrasing that draw the listener into a
private world of both a nameless sorrow and its consolation.
The SACD sound is very fine, and the excellent notes by Malcolm MacDonald
are much the same as those the author provided for Martin Jones’s
Nimbus complete set in the early 1990s. They are still among the best
of their kind, and nicely complement this excellent Brahms recital.
Roy Westbrook
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