Premiered in 1859, when the composer was just 25, the Piano Concerto in D minor is a passionate affair in which one can detect Brahms’s feelings for Clara Schumann and, in the Adagio, his anticipations of disappointment. Filjak, who’s been compared with Martha Argerich, gave it power but also thought, as in the way she built the first movement’s big F major theme to a climax instead of swooping right in. She drenched the entire work in rueful melancholy, and I liked the moonlit way in which she underlined the Adagio’s echoes of the last movement of Robert Schumann’s C major “Fantasie.’’ Her encore, Alexander Scriabin’s “Prelude for the Left Hand,’’ was of a piece with the concerto, bold and romantic.
Symphony No. 4, which Brahms completed in 1885, is an autumnal work of reflection and perhaps regret. Its first movement is a walk through swirling gusts and falling leaves, with the French horns announcing the arrival of hunters. Poised at its organ-like outset between C major and E minor (belief and doubt?), the Phrygian-tinged Andante moderato seems to have wandered into one of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s great Gothic cathedrals. A harvest festival is in progress in the Scherzo, which with its unusual 2/4 meter dances like a polka. The stately passacaglia finale is a theme and 30 variations, Brahms having derived the theme from the final chaconne of Bach’s Cantata No. 150, “Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich.’’
Zander’s reading was more stormy than stoic. The antiphonal seating of first and second violins that Brahms wrote for was not observed, so their dialogue was blurred; the horns and the timpani seemed loud throughout, and I could have wished for a less persistent nervous energy. But the orchestra played with conviction, there was a lot of transparency (you could actually hear the bassoons, here and in the concerto), and attention was paid to articulating Brahms’s cross-rhythms and bringing out the passacaglia theme.
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.
