It is great to see discussions starting up about this new arrangement from Dejan. There will be many more commments after the cd is released in January. I hope though that before one draws any conclusions please read Dejan's thoughts on this below and hopefully get a chance to hear this performance.
Jared
Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Major, Op. 77a -
arranged after the Violin Concerto by Dejan Lazic
World Premiere:
October 1, 2009 (additional concerts October 2 & 3, 2009)
at the Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, USA
Dejan Lazic, piano
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra / Robert Spano, conductor
My source of inspiration was a joint one: the piano versions of the Violin Concertos of Bach and Beethoven, which were made by the composers themselves.
I started working on this project in early 2003 and completed it in 2008. The violin was always a favourite love, and I continue to hold violinists in high esteem, realising just how wonderful their literature is. Thus far, I have been tremendously lucky to have had many an opportunity to perform with some wonderful colleagues. And it is with a degree of pride that I present – after Bach and Beethoven – the third “great B” in the present arrangement.
Subjectivity plays a role of course, and I have always found this particular concerto, along with Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, to be amongst the best instrumental concertos ever written. Naturally, I felt the challenge to arrange or transcribe the Brahms early on. I was intrigued by the idea of rendering it in an idiomatic version for piano and orchestra. The ultimate aim was clear: I wanted to perform it myself!
Perhaps composer and piano virtuoso Muzio Clementi felt the same way after listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Shortly after the performance, he asked Beethoven to arrange it for piano and orchestra, for he had fallen in love with this beautiful piece and wanted to play it himself, to present it to London audiences, and to make it as popular in England as it was on the Continent at the time. It is also interesting to note how Beethoven treats the first movement's original cadenza and how that passage holds major significance for him in the new arrangement: there, he composed an entirely new cadenza and scored it for piano and timpani no less.
Similarly, in my piano version of the Brahms Violin Concerto, I composed a new cadenza, for the simple reason that there is no extant Brahms cadenza. Added to which, the attempts by Joachim, Kreisler or Heifetz remain stubbornly suited to the violin, and are not really pianistic in their conception of the music; any arrangement of these would detract too much from their very essence. Besides, should not every cadenza be sort of a “free area”, one in which every soloist ought to be able to improvise on material previously heard?
The desire to arrange a violin concerto as a piano concerto just because one envisages donning the garb of the soloist, is not a good enough motive to take on this challenge. But I also do not feel there is any other romantic violin concerto that would survive the transformation.
At a musicological level, the correspondence between Brahms and his dedicatee Joseph Joachim played a major role for me. After numerous changes, much good advice, and actual corrections by Joachim it remains quite clear that Brahms had always composed as a pianist (at the piano) and therefore felt this music as a pianist, if also as a symphonic composer (originally, Brahms wrote the Violin Concerto in four movements, which was typical for a symphony). It is quite obvious that the Violin Concerto had its roots in both friendship and practicality: his aim was to write a concerto for Joachim, from which we can infer the term concerto took on a greater significance than the violin itself. But we are skating on thin ice here, what I mean to say is that it is quite justified to speculate about what would have happened if Joachim had been a cellist or a clarinettist, or even…a pianist!
What emerges from the text most readily is a liberal dose of difficulty that is simply not in the nature of the violin: Brahms remained first and foremost a pianist and thus on the outside of the world of a violin virtuoso. Maybe this explains why Hans von Bülow once described the concerto as being “against the violin”. Sarasate, for his part, simply refused to play it, and Vieniawski commented that it was “simply unplayable”. That is as may be, and we now know this not to be the case.
But another – possibly more important – question pops its head above the parapet: is one actually “allowed” to make such an arrangement?
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Brahms made countless arrangements and transcriptions of his and other composers’ works. I am convinced these were more than justified; hence, I hope that Brahms himself would not have anything against my idea. Let us dwell for a moment on Brahms and his contemporaries (not least Franz Liszt), who made a plethora of transcriptions, arrangements, variations, and produced much else besides. Nowadays, we seem to fail to cherish this great tradition. Maybe I am behaving here more as a composer than a performer – the line that divides production and reproduction is obviously an extremely thin one.
Again, turn your thoughts to Brahms’ beautiful Violin Sonata in G major, and then, if you will, to his own transcription of the piece for cello: what emerges is the wonderful Cello Sonata in D major, the composer wisely recasting the work in another key. A new tonality, another instrument. Altered and modified, the piece experiences a kind of transmogrification. The musical metamorphosis is complete. The same goes for both masterly written Clarinet Sonatas which Brahms transcribed for Viola, or his version of Bach's famous Chaconne for violin solo in D minor - for piano/left hand. At the end of the day, this is about music and not about the institutionalization of music...
What lingers is the rhetorical question of what is a transcription, what makes an arrangement, what may be defined as a new version. The key to this conundrum is that I sought to construct anew the violin part, recomposing the voice in a thorough-going Brahmsian style and adding my own cadenza. Of great import is that the orchestral score remains entirely unchanged!
With this arrangement, my main goal was to translate Brahms' unique musical language into a new setting without losing any of its original musical value and, in addition, to give pianists an equal chance to perform and enjoy this wonderful music the same way violinists do for exactly 130 years now...
Dejan Lazic, Spring 2009.
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