Sunwook Kim / Staatskapelle Dresden / Myung-Whun Chung JOHANNES BRAHMS Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 - Six Piano Pieces

PIANO CONCERTO No. 1 - SIX PIANO PIECES

Lisa Batiashvili JOHANNES BRAHMS / CLARA SCHUMANN

Lisa Batiashvili begins by working on the notes on the printed page. It is as pure and simple as that. “I prefer scores that contain as little additional information as possible,” she says. “Ideally, no fingering, no commentaries – I want to work on a new piece myself; it has to grow and eventually to become a part of me.”

For the Georgian violinist, notes are the most perfect language, a language in which emotions, desires and states of mind are revealed, none of which can be expressed in words. Such thoughts take us beyond our historical knowledge of the works’ composers and their lives. “Only when you accept their music as art”, she says, “does it become possible to create a link between the composers and our own day – only then can you fill your own work with thoughts and ideas and associations.”

From a historical point of view, it is, of course, very tempting to speculate about Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Clara Schumann’s Three Romances. What was the relationship between their two composers? Did they use music to express their love for each other? What is beyond doubt is that Brahms and Clara Schumann were close. At least from the time that Robert Schumann was immured in an asylum at Endenich, their contacts grew more intense, and the formal “Sie” that they had previously used when addressing each other gave way to the informal “Du” used to imply greater tenderness between them. But most of their letters were destroyed by mutual consent. “We can only speculate on the details of their relationship,” says Batiashvili, “and perhaps this explains the appeal of the whole affair, namely, that we can only surmise what happened and must use their music to enter their emotional worlds.”

For Batiashvili, who herself combines the demands of a career and a family, Clara Schumann is an altogether exceptional figure in the history of music: “Clara is hard to fathom. On the one hand, she was a modern woman who loved her art and her family – an emancipated artist. On the other hand, I do not think that she was happy. She sacrificed her life to Robert Schumann.”

It makes sense to Batiashvili that Brahms should have been infatuated with Clara, who was 14 years older than he was: “Clara was a consummate artist, a corrective to his work and a self-evident part of the life of Robert Schumann, who was Brahms’s great model and champion.” The fact that Clara was inspired by Brahms is something that the violinist attributes to Brahms’s genius: “Living with Schumann, Clara saw how he struggled to produce every note and found the compositional process a source of torment. And suddenly Brahms came along, a musician for whom composition was terrifyingly straightforward and for whom music was not a struggle but a joy. She must have been fascinated by the facility and ease that she discovered here.”

And Batiashvili naturally feels that Brahms’s Violin Concerto reflects its composer’s emotional state: “First and foremost there is this very long opening movement in which Brahms finds room for so many different ideas and thoughts. The difficulty of interpreting it lies in the fact that this kind of composition follows the German language: every note must be held to its full length and played with a singing tone, nothing can be swept under the table. At the same time it is important to create a single overarching structure and maintain an epic approach to the work, rather than moving step by step from one piece in the mosaic to the next. This movement requires great physical and intellectual effort.” The second movement reveals even more about the composer and his longings: “For me, it is an incredibly impassioned declaration of his love – and the violin seems like a woman’s voice here.”

 (Axel Brüggemann)

Lise de la Salle / Staatskapelle Dresden / Fabio Luisi CHOPIN Ballades - Piano Concerto No. 2

France's Naïve label has heavily promoted the career of the young pianist Lise de la Salle, who was 22 when this recording was made. Her fashion-spread good looks fit with Naïve's design concepts, and she has the ability to deliver the spontaneous, unorthodox performances the label favors. How does she fare in a field extremely crowded with Chopin recitals? Her performances certainly aren't derivative of anyone else, and this live recording from the Semperoper in Dresden (you get a one-minute track of just applause at the end) has a good deal of attention-getting flair. The standout feature of De la Salle's performance, in the four ballades at least, is her orientation toward slow tempos, inventively deployed. The ballades are somewhere between moderately slow and much slower than normal, but De la Salle is not trying to create a deliberate mood. Instead the operative adjective is "dreamy." She applies a good deal of rubato in the quieter passages, and against this backdrop the big tunes emerge as bright colors flitting across the landscape -- as dreams of the sun, perhaps -- rather than as lyrical anchors of the music. De la Salle does not lack power, but she applies it sparingly and explosively. It's undeniably an odd treatment of the ballades, but it's quite absorbing, and hearers' reactions may well be as idiosyncratic as the readings. The Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, is more conventional and benefits from sensitive accompaniment from the Staatskapelle Dresden under Fabio Luisi. Naïve's live production values are very high. (James Manheim)

Hélène Grimaud BEETHOVEN Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" / Piano Sonata No. 28

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud is one of the most sagacious of today's keyboard artists - a philosopher at the concert grand. Now she has taken on one of the greatest works of the piano literature, Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto. The result is a major event. Without pathos Grimaud delivers the contemporary update on a classic. She gives you thoughts, reflections and ideas instead of blood, sweat and tears. And yet the last piano concerto of the Bonn master, in her hands, is a work of musical extremes, a journey of the soul through the vales of worldly despair and over the peaks of ideologies. A musical journey to a world viewed from a melancholic interior, time-travelling from Beethoven's to ours. She makes music into one of the great struggles of our time.

Sound for Hélène Grimaud is space for thought - a place where everything is possible. It also means taking the world apart in order to put it back together in a new form. And that's precisely what she does, while remaining true to her idol Ludwig van Beethoven. There is no composer who described the current zeitgeist better than he did, none who went as far in extending existing formal boundaries in order to describe the struggle between the individual and the world order.
 Following a concert, the musician explains why the composer is one of her heroes: “He had to struggle with the problem of living at a time of discord, riven with disruption and contradiction. Truths that held one day were already passé the next. But none of that prevented Beethoven, ill, nearly deaf, from holding fast to his musical universalism. He was ready to overturn old forms and conventions in order to find new ones. It was not the world that was 'out of joint', but the language used to make sense of it." For Grimaud, this is the real challenge of Beethoven for our time: the doubting individual views a world gone awry. To bring it back under control Beethoven needed music.

“One can hear the struggle in Beethoven's compositions, his wrestling with every note, with every chord. He conceived the world in a way that I find absolutely contemporary, not to say modern. We too live in a world that we can hardly comprehend, one in which confusion exceeds our grasp of its overriding complexities. We too are desperately longing to give form to this world. Beethoven showed us that working to repair the fissures and flaws in human existence can result in beautiful music. He strove for a heaven on earth. He was always prepared to stand the world on its head."

For a long time, Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was interpreted as a heroic battle painting. Of course, Grimaud also hears galloping horses and the carnage of battle in the “Emperor" Concerto, and of course it also represents for her a piece of contemporary history - not a historical illustration of the past but rather of “philosophy cast in music, a philosophy that sets out to neutralize human contradictions". And this calls for a show of strength.
“Beethoven is one of the most fascinating of all period-spanning composers", says Grimaud. “Of course he was formed by the classical figures of the Viennese School, he not only brought their ideas to culmination, especially in the Fifth Piano Concerto, but also broke new ground." This development can also be heard in the Sonata op. 101, dedicated to Beethoven's pupil Dorothea von Ertmann, which Grimaud has chosen to complement the concerto.

Beethoven in his symphonies and piano concertos has fused the private with the political, the internal with the external, and it is this individualized, almost literary view of the single human being in the world that fascinates the pianist: “When you read Beethoven's letters, you get to know someone with misanthropic tendencies, who often reacted brusquely and rudely, who was easily disillusioned and offended by others - but, at the same time, in his sensibility, developed an incredible strength. Even as questionable as Beethoven's behaviour may at times have seemed, he firmly believed that things could also be different - that they could be better. His music is marked by these assertions and disappointments, and by an endless sense of hope. He formulated the ambivalence of every individual - and because of that Beethoven's music reaches us."

Something genuinely new in her Beethoven interpretations is Grimaud's handling of the composer's effects, which for her are never an end in themselves but extreme pronouncements: “I think that the real idea of Beethoven's music is found where the extremes collide", she says. “It's not about hollow pathos or empty, unquestioningly marching heroism, not about misanthropic melancholy or a concomitant world-weariness." Grimaud in her interpretations prefers to listen for the overtones, to expound theses in order immediately to develop antitheses.

Monumentality in her playing is entirely subjugated to the search for meaning. “The piano concerto is like a beast", says Grimaud, “for whom one has incredible respect. You study it - and in the end this beast reveals itself as a teacher. As a teacher who challenges you to consider things for yourself, who, through the overwhelming form the interpreter has to deal with, forces one to reflect on one's own contradictions and bring them into an individual form - to transcend one's own limits and toss old preconceptions overboard. Beethoven compels the artist to acquire knowledge, because in his music the emotional is developed out of philosophical logic. With emotion alone, one doesn't get very far."
 When you hear Grimaud's “Emperor", the work's heroic attributes take on a new significance. For this pianist, heroes aren't found on the battlefield. Her heroes attempt to bring order to the world as they find it. To save the world, they call themselves into question. Grimaud's new Beethoven also represents the birth of a wise new hero.