Orpheus at Carnegie Hall: Brahms and Schoenberg
Orpheus launched its new Carnegie Hall season last week with one of the strangest concerts that, in my experience, it has ever offered. The idea, I can see, was chaste enough: Brahms and Schoenberg. Vienna, in other words, Central. (Never forget that Schoenberg not only orchestrated Brahms’s first piano quartet – brilliantly, but with bold strokes that would have caused Brahms to burn the MS of the original in a vain attempt at prophylaxis – but that he also authored an important essay, “Brahms the Progressive,” in which he sniffed out all sorts of “modern” irregularities” in the older composer’s harmonies.) Unfortunately, the works scheduled for the first half of the concert were the wrong Brahms and the wrong Schoenberg. The latter’s Chamber Symphony should not appear anywhere near Brahms (who would undoubtedly burn Schoenberg’s MS as well), and, as for the Hungarian Dances that started thing off, they were Unearned Rewards. I love the Hungarian Dances – who does not – but, as with fine chocolates, I can’t swallow more than three at once at the absolute maximum. At least Orpheus got that right: there were only three dances.
As for the second half, let me just say that Allan Kozinn’s review in the Times, although entitled “One Pianist, One Orchestra, No Conductor,” never touched on what made the performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto different from all the ones that we’ve sat through with conductors. I think that a word or two on that subject just might have been order. As you’ll be able to tell from the new page at Portico.
