Mikael Rasmusson, in reply to my posting about Brahms:

>Felix Delbrueck wrote regarding Brahms orchestrations: ...
>
>>Incidentally, Rachmaninoff, whom I otherwise admire very much as an
>>interpreter, disliked the concerto so much on these counts that he
>>strongly berated Vladimir Horowitz for playing it.  By contrast, he
>>is supposed to have particularly liked Grieg's concerto.
>
>What's thatsuppose to mean?

It unfortunately means what it says: Horowitz was playing the Brahms
concerto in the 1930's, and Rachmaninoff more or less told him it was a
bad and shoddy work and he shouldn't be wasting his time over it.  The
bit about the Grieg concerto was a side stab by me - *I* think the Grieg
concerto is a bad and shoddy work and people shouldn't waste their time
over it.

>Maybe he didn't enjoy playing it because he didn't like the piano writing.
>And yes, he could reorchestrate B1, but maybe he still respected it as a
>piece of art and didn't want to change anything.

Yes ...  I don't buy that 'respecting a work as a piece of art' attitude,
to be honest.  Of course Rachmaninoff should have been able to see and
admire B1's merits through its surface deficiencies.  But an artwork is
man-made; it wasn't sent down from the heavens, and composers are not
infallable.  Refusing, after years of consideration of the matter, to
change things that you are convinced don't work or could be improved, is
not respect but cowardice and does the work a disservice.  Alfred Brendel,
for instance, said in one of his excellent musical essays that Schubert, in
the slow movement of the D959 A major sonata, would have done better if he
had more daringly usde a G sharp, rather than conventionally resolving onto
a G natural.  So why does he continue to play the G natural!  And Claudio
Arrau never quite got rid of the suspicion that the 'Andante favori' was a
better slow movement for the Waldstein sonata than the movement Beethoven
eventually settled for, but I don't think he ever tried it out in concert,
which would have been very interesting to listen to - and if it hadn't
worked, Arrau could have gone back to the original in his next recital.

That's of course one of the problems with our CD culture - it removes all
the flexibility that the transience of a live concert gives you.

>They may seem mechanical because they lack the dramatic impact that Liszt
>(yes, he wrote development sections) and Beethoven could produce.

I agree with you as far as Brahms goes: his symphonies especially often
seem to me less dramatically unified or cogent than Beethoven's mature
works.  The individual movements feel too 'rounded off', too formally
enclosed.  I think quite a number of people have said something about
Brahms's symphonies being more like baroque suites than 'all of a piece' -
but then, I haven't had a 'revelation' about Brahms yet.

I would never have thought that Wagner's operas lack dramatic significance!
No, thats surely not right - I think the problem in Wagner is the same
as with all opera - you've got a basic conflict between musical and
verbal/dramatic requirements.  Sometimes the needs of the drama take over
and the music suffers, sometimes the other way round.  For instance, the
celebrated orchestral ending of Goetterdaemmerung of course makes sense if
you analyse the meaning of all the different themes, but I always thought
it was a rather banal potpourri in sheer musical terms (but I still haven't
heard Furtwaengler in it!) Conversely, you have King Marke's long monologue
at the end of act 2 of Tristan - that's probably necessary to balance the
musical 'arch' of the act - but as theatre it's pretty interminable.

I think I have a similar problem with Liszt: in the right hands, his
music can certainly speak profoundly - listen to Ernst Levy in the quieter
parts of 'Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude' - but he, like Wagner,
tried to say extra-musical things with the leitmotiv method of transforming
and developing a number of different themes, and to me it doesn't always
work as music.  The sonata is in many ways a highly intellectual and
suggestive - and certainly dramatic!  - work, but again, you've got the
same few themes being continuously spun out and repeated in endless
sequences, and I'm not sure it always satisfies me musically - I know it
drove me crazy until I got a clearer picture in my head of what the themes
were 'about'.  That makes Liszt's music very difficult to perform
convincingly: you can't just 'play' it, you have to understand the
non-musical ideas that lie behind it.

By the way, is there anyone to whom the Grieg concerto *does* mean
something, and is there a particularly 'revelatory' recording of it? I
heard something about Percy Grainger playing it more convincingly than
anyone else.

Felix Delbruck
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