Garrick Ohlsson | PianoThursday, July 15, 2021 | 7:30PM

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GARRICK OHLSSON Piano

Thursday, July 15, 2021 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

BRAHMS Scherzo in E-flat minor, Opus 4

Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Opus 1 Allegro Andante Scherzo: Allegro molto e con fuoco Finale. Allegro con fuoco

Sixteen Waltzes, Opus 39

Four Pieces for Piano, Opus 119 Intermezzo in B Minor Intermezzo in E Minor Intermezzo in C Major Rhapsody in E-flat Major

This program is made possible by the generous support of Fred M. Levin, The Shenson Foundation.

Garrick Ohlsson is represented by Opus 3 Artists470 Park Ave. South, 9th Fl. North, New York, NY 10016opus3artists.com

Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco

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ARTIST PROFILE

Garrick Ohlsson continues his two-year, four-program exploration of Brahms’ solo piano works. Tonight is his ninth appearance with San Francisco Performances. His first recital for us was in May 2004.

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prow-ess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading ex-ponents of the music of Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire ranging over the entire piano literature and he has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century.

In the 2018–19 season he launched an ambitious project spread over two seasons exploring the complete solo piano works of Brahms in four programs to be heard in New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Los Angeles, London and a number of cities across North America. A frequent guest with the or-chestras in Australia, Mr. Ohlsson has recently visited Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart as well as the New Zealand Symphony in Wellington and Auckland. In February 2020 he accomplished a seven-city recital tour across Australia just prior to the closure of the concert world due to Covid-19. Since that time and as a faculty member of San Fran-cisco Conservatory of Music he has been able to contribute to keeping music alive for a number of organizations with live or recorded recital streams including a duo program with Kirill Gerstein, with whom he will tour the U.S. in winter 2022. Cur-rently scheduled for the reopening of concert activity in the U.S. are performances with Indianapolis and Cleveland Or-chestras, recitals in San Francisco and Brevard Festival, and four Brahms recitals at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival.

An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohlsson has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo and Takács string quar-

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tets, including most recently Boston Chamber Players on tour in Europe. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Fran-cisco-based FOG Trio. Passionate about singing and singers, Mr. Ohlsson has appeared in recital with such legendary art-ists as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman, and Ewa Podleś. Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels.

A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his pi-ano studies at the age of eight, at the Westchester Conservato-ry of Music; at 13 he entered the Juilliard School, in New York City. He has been awarded first prizes in the Busoni and Mon-treal Piano competitions, the Gold Medal at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw (1970), the Avery Fisher Prize (1994), the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI (1998), the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music (2014), and the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cul-tural merit from the Polish Deputy Culture Minister.

PROGRAM NOTES

Scherzo in E-flat Minor, Opus 4

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)

The Scherzo in E-flat Minor is the earliest composition by Brahms to survive and to be performed today. He wrote it in 1851, when he was only 18, and there is a remarkable story about one of its early performances.

In the summer of 1853 Brahms set out on a concert tour with the violinist Eduard Remenyi. Brahms and Remenyi were in-vited to one of Liszt’s musical soirées in Weimar, and sudden-ly the 20-year-old Brahms found himself in the presence of the greatest pianist in the world. Liszt invited the young man to play some of his own compositions, but Brahms was so in-

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timidated that he could not play. Liszt, always generous and cordial to young composers, responded: “Well then, I shall have to play.” He set Brahms’ scrawled manuscript on his pia-no and gave—at sight—a note-perfect performance, following it with great praise for the music and its composer.

One can see the appeal of the Scherzo in E-flat Minor for Liszt—this was his kind of music: brilliant, extraordinarily difficult, and full of that demonic, driving character that so haunted the romantic imagination. Brahms marks the open-ing Rasch und feurig (“Quick and fiery”), and that beginning flickers between shadowy gestures and full-throated out-bursts. By contrast, Trio I turns gentle—Brahms marks it pia-cevole (“comfortable”) and teneramente (“tenderly”). The scher-zo returns, followed by the grand and flowing Trio II. Brahms drives the Scherzo to a suitably thunderous conclusion, full of strength, determination, and a whiff of the demonic.

No wonder Liszt liked this music so much.

Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Opus 1

In a famous remark, Brahms spoke of working in the shad-ow of Beethoven and of “how the tramp of a giant like him” haunted his efforts to compose a symphony. The young Brahms was no less aware of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and everyone feels the similarity between the opening of Brahms’ Sonata in C Major and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata: the rhythm is identical, and the openings make the same broad and dramatic gesture. But the teenaged composer is already in possession of his own voice, and this sonata is unmistak-ably the music of Brahms rather than an imitation of Beetho-ven. It is a big-boned work in four substantial movements, and it stretches out to over half an hour.

The opening Allegro is in a broad sonata form: the dramat-ic beginning gives way to extensive and varied secondary material, which Brahms specifies should be both dolce and con espressivo; much of the development, in fact, treats this lyric material before the movement pounds to its dramatic close. The second movement is in variation form, and Brahms

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uses as his theme a melody that he believed an old German folksong. This movement proceeds without pause into the Scherzo, appropriately marked Allegro molto e con fuoco, which gallops along its 6/8 meter. The relatively cheerful mood of its beginning is gradually left behind as the music approach-es the end of its opening section, which seems to end in the middle of nowhere on stark E-minor chords. The finale is in rondo form, and its opening theme is a variant of the opening gesture of the first movement. The sonata dances its way to an ebullient close on a lengthy coda, now in 6/8, that Brahms marks Presto non troppo ed agitato.

Sixteen Waltzes, Opus 39

We have become so accustomed to a forbidding image of Brahms—the man with the piercing blue eyes, flowing beard, and frosty manner—that it is easy to forget there was a differ-ent man and composer behind that sometimes difficult exteri-or. This was a more relaxed Brahms—warm, sensual, fun-lov-ing—and this side of him appears in a number of charming works he wrote during his first years in Vienna. Brahms orig-inally composed the Sixteen Waltzes in January 1865, and in its first version this music was for piano four-hands; the version of single pianist appeared three years later.

Brahms particularly admired the music of Franz Schubert, and the vast number of dances and waltzes for piano by that earlier composer may have served as the inspiration here. Brahms’ waltzes are sparkling miniatures, lasting only about a minute each (some flash past in only a few seconds); all are in binary form, with the two halves repeated. Music this charming and graceful hardly needs comment. The best way to hear it may be simply to sit back and enjoy music in which Brahms was so obviously enjoying himself.

Four Pieces for Piano, Opus 119

As he approached his 60th birthday, Brahms returned to the instrument of his youth, the piano. The young Brahms—the

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“heaven-storming Johannes,” as one of his friends described him—had established his early reputation as the composer of dramatic piano works: of his first five published works, three were big-boned piano sonatas, and he next produced a series of extraordinarily difficult sets of virtuoso variations. And then suddenly, at age 32, Brahms walked away from solo piano music, and—except for some brief pieces in the late 1870s—that separation would last nearly three decades.

When the aging Brahms returned to the instrument of his youth, he was a very different man and a very different compos-er from the “heaven-storming Johannes” of years before. During the summers of 1892–93, Brahms wrote 20 brief piano pieces and published them in four sets as his Opp. 116–119. While perhaps technically not as demanding as his early piano works, these 20 pieces nevertheless distill a lifetime of experience and technical refinement into very brief spans, and in their focused, inward, and sometimes bleak way they offer some of Brahms’ most per-sonal and moving music. Someone once astutely noted that a cold wind blows through these late piano pieces; Brahms himself described them as “lullabies of my pain.”

Brahms’ Opus 119 consists of three intermezzos and a con-cluding rhapsody. Most of these brief pieces are in ABA form: a first theme, a countermelody usually in a contrasting tempo and tonality, and a return to the opening material, often varied on its reappearance.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger

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