JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 (1854-58)
The First Piano Concerto is a remarkable work from a young man who started out on his musical career as a piano player in the dives and taverns of Hamburg’s harbor. Its evolution was complex and its gestation long, due in part to Brahms’s self-critical nature and to the high expectations he would have to live up to, in order to meet Robert Schumann’s prophecy about the then-just-20-year-old composer: he would “ reveal his mastery not by gradual development but would spring, like Minerva, fully armed, from the head of Jove.” Brahms revised the concerto even after its premiere in 1859, when he was the soloist and Joseph Joachim conducted. The concerto is symphonic in scope, lasting around 45 minutes. The rolling thunder of the timpani marks the concerto’s long and stormy orchestral introduction, whose mood, according to Joachim, was colored by events in Schumann’s life—his attempted suicide in 1854 and subsequent confinement in an asylum till his death two years later. The peaceful Adagio comes as blessed relief (“I am also painting a lovely portrait of you; it is to be the Adagio,” the composer wrote to Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife and Brahms’s platonic love). The Rondo finale with its two huge cadenzas brings this powerful and massively difficult work to a rousing conclusion. In his book on Brahms, Burnett James wrote: “The D Minor Concerto is a direct and authentic transcript of Brahms’s deepest and most tortured experiences at the time of its production. It also marks the end of Brahms’s youthful romantic period. Never again was he to let himself go with such uninhibited passion; never again to wear his heart so unashamedly on his sleeve….”

ANTONÍN DVORÁK (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 8 in G Major (1889)
The Symphony No. 8 is something of a landmark in the compositional life of its creator, Antonín Dvorák. His career had been fostered and his works championed by none other than Johannes Brahms, and Brahms’s Germanic influence was powerful. But with this next-to-last symphony Dvorák would strike out in a new direction, both in terms of loosening the formal Germanic structures and expressing his identity as a Bohemian composer. Just how far his change in direction had gone is evident in the fact that the composer broke with his publisher Simrock (who was insisting that Dvorák use the German spelling of his first name, which Dvorák did not want to do). And to add insult to financial injury, Simrock publishers offered to pay him less for his Eighth Symphony than they had paid for the Seventh. His renown was on the upswing, not just in Europe, but in the US as well, where he conducted the present symphony in Chicago in 1893. He once admitted the ease with which he could create a seemingly endless stream of tunes, saying, “Melodies simply pour out of me”—something that is certainly evident in this work. He always thought of himself as a simple man of the soil, enjoying his walks in the Bohemian forests. Harold Schoenberg called him “the happiest and least neurotic of the late Romantics… With Handel and Haydn, he is the healthiest of all composers.” His peaceful summer retreat at Vysoká no doubt served as the inspiration for the gorgeous melodies that seem to cascade one after another in the opening movement, and for the Bohemian flavors that come into play in the lovely Adagio. A waltz-like rhythm can be heard in the third movement, and the Finale, introduced by a trumpet fanfare, is a theme and variations that features exuberant brass calls all around before coming to a rousing conclusion.

CHRISTOPH VON DOHNÁNYI, conductor, born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany
One of the world’s pre-eminent conductors, Christoph von Dohnányi comes from a renowned musical family; he is the grandson of the well-known Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi. His family suffered harrowing experiences in World War II Germany, with his father, Hans, and three other family members (including his uncle, the noted theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer) executed by the Nazis for their role in the anti-Hitler resistance. After studies in Germany, he joined his grandfather, who had immigrated to the United States, to study music at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and later he trained with Leonard Bernstein. After returning to Germany, his career path included posts with several German opera houses and orchestras and a full schedule of guest conducting. From 1984 to 2002 he held his most influential post—his legendary 20-year tenure as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, which he led in a thousand concerts, fifteen international tours, twenty-four premieres, and recordings of more than one hundred works that span the spectrum from the classics through Ives, Varèse, and Lutosławski. Last season he became Honorary Conductor for life of the Philharmonia Orchestra, with whom he had a highly successful partnership that began in 1994, when he was appointed principal guest conductor and, from 1997 on, as principal conductor and artistic adviser. Audiences everywhere eagerly await his performances. The Washington Post captured this feeling: “Dohnányi is perhaps the only active conductor whose appearances inspire the passionate anticipation that used to greet the late performances of such long-ago maestros as Leonard Bernstein and Herbert van Karajan.”

“Dohnányi unleashed the orchestra like a tidal wave.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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RADU LUPU, piano, born in 1945 in Galati, Romania
“Lupu, a gentle genius of the piano, looks less like a jet-set virtuoso than an unsung radical poet, the kind you would expect to find huddled over gnomic manuscripts in the corner of an obscure café. Lupu disavowed showpieces and devoted himself to the high Austro-German repertory, from Mozart to Brahms.” (The New Yorker) Radu Lupu began his piano studies when he was just six years old, and made his debut at age 12, playing a program of his own compositions. In 1961 he won a scholarship to the Moscow State Conservatory. He won first prizes in the 1966 Van Cliburn, the 1967 Enescu International, and the prestigious 1969 Leeds International competitions. Since then he has been one of the world’s most respected soloists and recitalists. In 1996 he took home a Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist for his recording of two Schubert sonatas. The Chicago Sun Times summed up this enigmatic performer (usually referred to as “reclusive”) by saying that in the more than 50 years before the public “his formula varies little. He gives about 80 performances a year around the world and makes only the occasional recording. He shuns piano benches and stools, sitting onstage instead on an office chair. He has parted his hair down the middle for half a century and lets his now gray beard grow fairly long between trims.” Radu Lupu refuses to exploit the mystique that seems to surround him, focusing instead on interpreting the music. “The artist should have his own voice,” he said in a rare interview in 1991. “Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value, and I don’t even care if all those notes are there or not.” In his free time he is a student of history and enjoys playing bridge and chess.

“One of the ‘great’ pianists of our time in some of the greatest music of all time.” The Independent (London)

“The velvety richness of his sound, his acutely sensitive style of pedaling, and his astounding dynamic control—he must have at least 20 gradations between mezzo-piano and pianississimo—were all clearly present.” San Francisco Classical Voice

“The music was so tightly focused as to hold the listener in Lupu’s thrall…” Guardian Unlimited

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