Stephen Hough Performs Brahms

As a teenager with Adonis good looks, Johannes Brahms helped support his family by playing dance music in the dockside brothels of Hamburg.  He premiered his own Piano Concerto No.1 at the age of 26, still uncertain about his skill at orchestration.

From the very start, this concerto has the emotional ferocity of a young composer, playing out that arch-Romantic struggle between ecstasy and despair. Yet it’s still a restrained, almost symphonic work with the orchestra given equal prominence and musical initiative as the keyboard, even when in the masterful hands of visiting pianist Sir Stephen Hough, a composer himself and an impressive writer. 

Brahms oscillates between piano and orchestra, tracing the forces of storm and stress, and while the piano concludes in the lead, the composer offers few displays of keyboard bravura.  The continuing rises and falls in musical intensity through the three movements finally becomes hypnotic and repetitive. 

Diminutive conductor Elim Chan is a real firecracker who keeps the detail exact and the pace leaping. She seems even airborne when also conducting the first work of the concert, a series of four popular suites from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet score for Romeo and Juliet.

Soviet Russia lured Prokofiev back to his homeland with the promise of big commissions, but many problems thwarted the premiere of his new ballet just before WWII – including the arrest and murder in one of Stalin’s purges of both the Bolshoi’s artistic director and conductor.

Onstage with Shakespeare’s tragedy, early authorities thought Prokofiev’s score was too joyless and he was convinced at first to leave the lovers alive. For this SSO concert, the first famous suite captures in grand procession the arrogance of Montagues and Capulets, then multi-strings suggest the lover’s purity, another suite the lingering threat behind the Masks, while the final suite ends with music of furious violence in the Death of Tybalt.  It’s a thrilling dramatic score, even if the four suites total just 15 minutes and feel a bit fractured by being torn out of order from the narrative.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Craig Abercrombie