Brahms’ B-flat Piano Concerto (1881) dates from the start of the composer’s ripest maturity, the period when his fame had reached a peak throughout Europe and his physical image as we know it best was fixed: bearded and corpulent. It was also the time when one of his more tiresome quirks began to mark his correspondence: his cutesy references to his scores, the larger they got, as “miniatures.”
Thus, Brahms described the sketches for Op. 83 to his friend and cultural mentor, the Viennese surgeon Dr. Theodor Billroth, as “some little piano pieces.” He went further with his friend and confidante Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: “It is a tiny, tiny little concerto with a tiny, tiny little scherzo.” This for what may well have been the largest piano concerto written to that time in terms of its complexity (of which the listener is never made aware), thematic variety, and sheer length.
The Concerto in B-flat, in four movements rather than the usual three, opens with a marvelous, mood-setting horn call that seems to gather all the other instruments, with the piano responding to its graceful melody with its own, equally graceful arpeggios before embarking on a thorny cadenza that announces the virtuoso nature of the movement in no uncertain terms.
Whenever one thinks the drama is on the verge of getting out of hand, the composer reintroduces a familar element, the opening horn theme, played either by that instrument or by different sections of the orchestra.
Listen now to Yuja Wang as she performs this amazing music for you:
