“Look at virtually any picture of Brahms and you see a fat man," he says. "Of course, I carft say how mach that influences your way of approaching his music, but too often Brahms is played in a rather 'fat' fashion. One forgets that inside this ample person was a very fragile soul, and yer it can be diffcult to transfer from what seems like mere physical weight to fragility warmth and striving after the inexpressible. Brahms is too often considered a sort of throned monument, looking dawn on the romantic world; a mighty academician, the heavyweight champion of composing." Gidon Kremer
"I feel that the musical language of the Double Concerto rnakes it clear that Brahms conceived it as a gesture of sympathy and reconciliation between him and his musician friend. This idea offers a very interesting basis for an interpretation, since dialogue is such a fundamental element, especially in a double concerto. I have found ideal partners for this conversation in Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gidon Krerner. With its important cello part, the work stirs a craving for more. I shall always regret that Brahms didn't write a 'genuine' cello roncerto." Clemens Hagen
Johannes Brahms’s violin works are closely connected to his friendship with Joseph Joachim, the leading violin virtuoso of his time. Just as Brahms submitted many of his piano works to Clara Schumann for her criticism and suggestions, so did he take the advice of his friend Joachim with regard to violin pieces, the more so as he did not play the violin himself. Brahms composed the Violin Concerto op. 77 in the idyllic town of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee in the summer of 1878 and presented it to Joachim for his evaluation. The intensive exchanges that ensued resulted in the elimination of the second and third movements, which were replaced by the Adagio we know today. Brahms thus turned an originally four-movement concerto into a three-movement one. The work was dedicated to Joseph Joachim and premièred in Leipzig on 1 January 1879 with the dedicatee as soloist and the composer conducting. In spite of frequently voiced objections to the work’s purportedly overly symphonic and insufficiently violinistic character, this concerto quickly conquered the world’s concert halls and is part of every great violinist's repertoire today. Bronislaw
Huberman was even able to claim the particular privilege of having moved Brahms to tears with his playing as a l3-year-old prodigy.
Brahms ultimately left the cadenza entirely up to his friend Joachim. Although this is the one that is generally played today, other cadenzas have been written for this work by renowned violinists such as Leopold Auer and Fritz Kreisler, and even by the piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni. In this recording, Gidon Kremer plays the cadenza written in 1903 by George Enescu. In 1894, when he was 13, Enescu met Brahms in Vienna and played at the third desk of the violins in a performance of Brahms's First Symphony conducted by the composer. The Romanian violinist and composer taught Yehudi Menuhin, among others, and many of his works are now being performed for the first time in many years, such as the opera Oedipe or the Impressions d'enfance op. 28 for violin and piano, which Gldon Kremer recently recorded for Teldec.
The first movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto makes it clear that the solo violin is merely one instrument among many, albeit an important one. It is delicately interwoven into the orchestral texture and alternates between playing the melodic lead and the accompaniment. Its first entrance is preceded by a tranquil theme in the low strings and winds which acquires a spatial dimension through its descending and ascending triadic melody before ending on the dominant. The music is propelled forward by canonic entries and syncopations, and spun out in a delicate chamber-style writing until it reaches the contrasting second theme with its sharply accented dotted sixteenth notes. Now, at last, the solo violin is allowed to make its entrance with exuberant figurations before it, too, takes up the main theme. The tendency to treat the solo violin as a primus inter pares is even more pronounced in the slow movement. Pablo de Sarasate allegedly said that he would not even think of listening to the oboe play the only melody in the piece while he just stood there, idly holding his violin. The movement begins with a songful oboe melody accompanied solely by the woodwinds. The solo violin also states the melody, but "only" in an embellished version. This tripartite movement is predominantly placid, though its middle section is harmonically quite bold. The violin describes melodically and rhythmically polished arches and pours forth an almost inexhaustible, endless flow of melody.
As in a number of other finales in Brahms’s works, the last movement of the concerto evokes Hungarian folk music, but in a way that defies a precise identification with any specific models. Hungarian-sounding musical traits are frequent in the 19th century and can be found in Johann Strauß's Die Fledermaus as well as in works by Franz Liszt. However, research conducted in the 20th century, especially by Bartók and Kodály, has shown that the topos of Hungarian folk music actually has its roots in the music of nomadic gypsies. In Brahms's Violin Concerto, the melody in thirds, the cimbalon accompaniment suggested in the strings and the downward-leaping syncopation can be identified as “Hungarian” musical characteristics. The solo violin has a more pronounced role here than in the preceding movements and keeps rushing forward to take the lead with the rousing main therne. However, here too the symphonically differentiated orchestral writing and the lyrical points of rest within the surging flow of the rondo show that Brahms was aiming to produce more than simply a folkloric effect.
Brahms’s last orchestral work, the Concerto for Violin, \/ioloncello and Orchestra op. 102, is even more closely connected with Joseph Joachim than the Violin Concerto, not only in a musical sense, but also with respect to the personal relationship between the two artists and friends. Their friendship had cooled considerably after Brahms took the side of Joachim's wife Amalie in a marital dispute between the couple. Both Brahms's biographer Max Kalbeck and Clara Schumann interpreted the work as an attempt to restore the friendship. Clara wrote in her diary: "It is a thoroughly original work. This concerto is, in a sense, a gesture of reconciliation - Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years."
Written in Thun in 1887, the concerto was premièred at Cologne's Gürzenich Hall on 18 October 1887 with Joachim and the cellist Robert Hausmann playing under Brahms’s direction. The composer's wish for reconciliation was apparently fulfilled. Although Brahms's relationship with Joachim was the outward occasion for the work, it is also reflected in the composition itself. It is more than plausible to see the two friends in the interplay of the solo instruments and to interpret the duet in thirds in the epilogue of the last movement as a final peacemaking. Brahms even alludes to his friend in the notes of the theme by quoting the motto F-A-E in the main theme of the first movement. This is the motto Joachim had chosen for his own life and which both friends shared: “Frei, aber einsam" (free but lonely). Brahms never married and, after an ill-fated love affair and his intense closeness to Clara Schumann, he gave up all hope ofa lasting relationship. In a letter written in l887, the year he composed the Double Concerto, Brahms wrote: "I need absolute solitude not only in order to accomplish what I am capable of, but basically in order to think at all about my own affairs. That is part of my nature, but is also easy to explain... Whoever, like myself, enjoys life and art beyond that of his own making is only too tempted to enjoy both - and to forget other things. Perhaps it is also the brightest and most correct thing to do. But now that a large new work looms before me. I am really quite happy about it and must tell myself: I would never have written it if I had been enjoyng myself so wonderfully on the Rhine and in Berchtesgaden."
There are different versions of some solo passages, which suggest the influence of Joachim's proposals. Certain passages from hitherto unpublished versions have been selected for this recording.
More so than the Violin Concerto, the Double Concerto unfolds a chamber-music texture over broad stretches. This also results from the importance attributed to the two soloists, who yield to the orchestra only 60 of the 340 bars of the last movement. Ensuing from his own experience as a pianist and chamber musician, Brahms’s concept requires the musicians - soloists and orchestra - to interpret all the subtle shadings and to listen very carefully to each other. Brahms thus wrote two concertos for the virtuoso Joseph Joachim in which the soloist was required to fulfill a completely different role from that which was expected from a concerto soloist in the 19th century. No wonder that even the critic Eduard Hanslick, an avowed friend of Brahrns, maintained certain reservations about the work. Fortunately, history has proven him wrong.