A marvellous performance of a beautifully constructed sonata. As is usually the case with Brahms, if you come here looking for sugary melodies or passages of sparking brilliance you’ll be disappointed. Brahms, even at the young age at which he wrote this sonata, was (astoundingly) already too musically mature for that. What Brahms *does* offer is here, however, is immensely rewarding– an expressive directness that if handled clumsily comes across as crudity (but which Zimerman handles perfectly), and a sense of structure and logic that is absolutely self-assured, even unshakeable. [One example: the third movement is the fourth variation of the second movement!] Although you’ll often hear this sonata (the first Brahms wrote, though published as the second) described as a juvenile work, full of bombast, that assessment strikes me as being very far off the mark: consider the desolate, minimalist beauty of the second movement, its late-Beethoveneque sense of deconstuctive stillness, and you realise there’s nothing bombastic about this work at all.
00:00 – Mvt 1, Allegro non troppo ma energico. A brooding movement in conventional sonata-allegro form. Brahms strenuously resists dwelling for long in any well-defined mood here, and Zimerman perfectly captures the profound sense of unease that pervades this movement. Note how the restatement of Theme 1 in the recapitulation is altered to be more dissonant and unsettling, a striking decision for a section that is supposed to bring the movement to a close.
06:09 – Mvt 2, Andante con espressione. A theme and variations based on a German song. The melody is vanishingly skeletal, based on a stark call-and-response structure. At the end of the third variation, the music comes to rest on the dominant, achingly unresolved. Brahms directs the performer to move straight on to the scherzo, which is really the fourth variation on the theme. Zimerman’s playing generates an incredible sense of disintegration, of falling-apart. Even the high syncopated responses of the second variation and the aching-toward-lushness of the third variation sound disturbing.
12:28 – Mvt 3, Scherzo. The opening call-and-response of Mvt 2 is simply transferred to the 6/8 meter. The calls are played in octaves, the responses in much higher harmonies. Unusually, the trio is a lot longer than the scherzo, and contains numerous beautiful and deceptive shifts to minor where a major key is expected, generating a modal sense of placid calm.
17:01 – Mvt 4, Finale. Usually, this is by far and away the most substantial movement of the work, beginning with a lengthy introduction, whose subject is also the first theme of this movement – although in the exposition the theme now opens with a biting half-step dissonance. The exposition here gets a full repeat (unlike that of Mvt 1). In the recapitulation, Theme 1 has subtle variations in the harmony and accompaniment from its initial presentation, but the most striking variation is in the second phrase, where Brahms seems to want to shift everything up a half-step, but then quickly moves back home at the trill and cadence, which is extended a bar with broken arpeggios. The development is also spectacular, featuring modulations which appear to overshoot their mark, only to find their way rapidly home. Even the ending of this movement is mysterious: the bottom F-sharp of the closing scale, hushed and secretive, is followed by two suddenly loud, jarring rolled F-sharp major chords, and the slow coda has the effect of arresting, rather than fulfilling the movement’s progress. Zimerman rises to the remarkable structural demands of this movement, handling this movement’s vast textural terrain with great confidence [see 26:28, etc].