Brahms 4 Hands Piano

[Olowookere Devost]

Ididn't know, until my dear friend Lana Marina did so -- at the Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition last week in Fort Worth, Texas. In fact, I didn't know that a lot was possible until I saw the video of her onstage playing at the Cliburn, and considered what it took for her to reach that moment.

I met Lana in college, when we were both music majors at Northwestern University (see picture right- ooh my '80s hair!). I was a little bit of a piano wannabe, so I used to sneak into the weekly piano recital hour with her and her fellow piano students to listen to them play. I still remember her lightning speed in Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, among other things. After music school, Lana went to Law School at Cornell University, then found success as a trademark lawyer. As good as she was at music, she stopped playing the piano.

When Lana returned her attention to the piano in 2012, she had not played in 22 years. Playing those first notes after that kind of hiatus had to take guts. The Cliburn requires some 50 minutes of recital music plus a movement from a concerto, and mastering that took her four years of discipline, new lessons and self-driven hard work. Entering the competition itself took sheer daring. And there is more to it than that. Since 2007 Lana also has lived with multiple sclerosis. Setting the goal of playing the Cliburn was an act of life-affirming defiance, not to be limited by MS. The night before the first performance, she suffered a relapse in which her legs stopped working, and her doctors recommended against leaving the hospital. She left, and she performed anyway, with her husband and daughter helping her on and off stage. She got through three rounds and was one of 12 semi-finalists. Though she did not make the finals, she won a Jury Discretionary Award.

I'm no expert on piano repertoire, but as far as I can tell, Lana packed her program with virtuoso pieces. Still, I kept coming back to the Bach Chaconne, arranged by Brahms for left hand only. You can find her performance in the video below, at 6:07:30.

I love this piece on the violin, but as you can hear, it sounds beautiful on the piano. Brahms knew what he was doing, too; he had great respect for the piece. As Brahms famously said upon discovering it: "On one stave, for a small instrument, (Bach) writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." Brahms' transcription for piano left hand is faithful not only to Bach's original notes, but also to the way they must be realized on a violin. For example, Brahms expressly writes into the score the many compromises we violinists have to make when playing a succession of three- and four-note chords on four separate strings, with a bow.

The piece has a certain divine essence, it can absorb and haunt the listener. I truly love it. Some 10 years ago, I studied it enough to get it into my fingers and let it creep into my soul -- though I never felt like I'd mastered it well enough to think of performing it. I like to play the Sonatas and Partitas in rotation, but in recent years I've avoided the D minor. It's just too monumental. Plus, it's kind of long. And it doesn't exactly play itself, it has all kinds of finger-twisty chords, awkward string crossings, complex voicing. Technically speaking, if you want to be literal about it, it's physically impossible to play what Bach wrote on the page, on the violin. It would help to have three hands with six fingers on each.

"If you can dream it, do it." That quote often is attributed to Walt Disney, though my Theme Park Insider husband tells me it's actually a line written years after his death by Disney Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald for the old Horizons ride in Disney World's Epcot theme park. But it's age-old human truth. We look for excuses to avoid those difficult yet noble things that we feel called to do. Yet those monumental, impossible, improbable things we want to do because we were made to want to do them -- those are the very things we should pursue with single-minded doggedness.

July 7, 2016 at 05:11 PM One of my colleagues performed in the first amateur Van Cliburn in 1999. There were some 90 pianists in the first round, but still just getting there was quite an accomplishment.

Her age (about 60 at the time) caused quite a stir. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, "The audience favorite of the afternoon was a research chemist and grandmother from Virginia, who devoted her program to a richly textured reading of Chopin's Ballade No. 1."

The arrangement of Brahms' Quartet op. 25 was written in 2016/17 and premiered on October 27, 2017 in Gersthofen near Augsburg by the dedicatees Sivan Silver and Gil Garburg and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie under Florian Krumpck.

I had previously arranged Schubert's Grande Sonata (originally for piano four hands) for piano four hands and string orchestra, and after the successful premiere, Gil Garburg suggested the Brahms piano quartets to me in order to have another work in this instrumentation.

Originally I had scruples about arranging the 1st Quartet op. 25, as there is an orchestral version of this work by Schnberg. However, the fact that this version is very problematic and, in my opinion, (as someone who has his artistic roots in Vienna, whose roots also lie partly in the Second Viennese School and who loves and highly respects many of Schnberg's works) is one of his least successful operas, encouraged me to rework this piece, especially in a completely different instrumentation.

Secondly, in the original version for piano quartet, the musical content almost pushes the instrumentation to its limits, the compositional richness and the almost symphonic density actually "burst" the chamber music instrumentation.

And thirdly, that op. 25 is a particular highlight in Brahms' oeuvre and one of his most successful and magnificent works, which can also win over a wider audience thanks to the larger instrumental setting and also puts a repertoire piece by Brahms into the hands of piano duos.

I was also attracted by the concertante element bubbling under the surface and its unleashing, and, as I said, the possibility of including Brahms' own arrangement of the work for piano four hands in my new version. Being able to alternate between the versions, as well as to create "mixtures" between them or to find my own solutions within the framework of the existing one, meant that not only could I reinforce a concert dramaturgy but also create a new one.

So I composed carefully in many places, because simply creating a dramaturgical division between the two original versions would have led to a patchy and thin result. The repeats in the last movement, for example, were all "orchestrated". I also extended the cadenza for two-handed piano to one for four hands.

So, the whole thing has nothing whatsoever to do with a scholarly or philological work, I ultimately approached the original as if it were my own and had the courage to do things that a pure arranger would never allow himself to do.

This is much more an act of (present-day) re-composition than a mere arrangement, and is due to the fact that I am deeply convinced that limiting myself to a purely technical or purely philological level here (and in instrumentation in general) can neither prove worthy of the spirit of the original composition nor create a living work of art. For the love of the original piece and its composer demands that new creativity be applied.

For me, instrumentations are like translations in literature, which, when they are made by artists who bring their own personality to the work to be translated, can become original reinterpretations, as in the case of Hlderlin, Stefan George or Celan, for example, or in music with Bach, Henze, Ravel, Webern or Shostakovich...

Ideally, the arranging composer sees the new instrumentation already laid out in the original work, just as Michelangelo selected the marble blocks in the Carrara quarry in such a way that they were ideal for the planned sculptures; indeed, he has already "seen" the new work into the stone structures.

The Music Division holds over 50 music manuscripts in Brahms's hand. These unique holdings include: Brahms's holograph manuscripts and arrangements of his own works, others' holograph manuscript arrangements of Brahms's music, Brahms's holograph manuscript cadenzas to other composers' works, and others' holograph manuscript cadenzas to Brahms's concertos.

Many of the Music Division's holograph manuscripts have been scanned and are freely available to view and download through the Music Treasures Consortium Digital Collection. Request and view items that have not been digitized in the Performing Arts Reading Room. Links to scans are provided when available. Titles identified as "catalog record," will link to fuller bibliographic information about the item in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Some of the most significant Brahms manuscripts in the Music Division's collections include:

Several of the Music Division's Brahms manuscripts are the composer's own arrangements of his compositions for either piano four hands or two pianos. View and download many of them through the Music Treasures Consortium Digital Collection. Some of these arrangements are:

Other music manuscripts and arrangements in the Music Division's collections specific to Brahms are listed here. Titles identified as "catalog record," will link to fuller bibliographic information about the item in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

The Music Division holds several holograph manuscripts of concerto cadenzas written by Brahms or by others for his concertos. Titles identified as "catalog record," will link to fuller bibliographic information about the item in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. These manuscripts are:

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