For his contemporaries, Johannes Brahms was a traditionalist, an academic, an heir to the past, drawing on Baroque and Classical patterns, the composer of Beethoven’s "Tenth Symphony". Arnold Schoenberg saw his work completely differently. The Viennese pioneer of dodecaphony perceived Brahms as an artist focused, like himself, on the issue of musical form. By developing a variational technique that allowed him to avoid mechanical repetitions of motifs, Brahms turned out to be an unrivaled innovator for Schoenberg in this field. “It seems to me that the progress that Brahms experienced should stimulate composers to write music for adults,” wrote Schoenberg.
If we agree with Schoenberg, it would be difficult to point to a better example of “music for adults” than his own orchestral arrangement of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor. The composer of Pierrot lunaire believed that the Quartet, completed in its original version in 1861, was performed too rarely. He appreciated it very much, but he thought that the musicians could not cope with its texture. “The better the pianist, the louder he plays, and then the strings stop being audible. I wanted everything to be heard and I managed to achieve it,” he explained. In Schoenberg’s version, we will not hear the piano at all, and the rich orchestral score includes instruments that Brahms would certainly not have thought of: a bass clarinet, bells and a xylophone.
The piano will appear in the second part of the evening, when the American pianist Tzimon Barto, together with the Wrocław Philharmonic conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, will perform Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G minor. The rarely presented work of the great Czech composer was compared to Brahms’s piano concertos. Both Romantics opposed the 19th-century trend that forced compositions in this genre to be subordinated to virtuosic display. In their interpretations, they equalise the proportions between the importance of the soloist’s part and the orchestra’s playing, making both dependent on the development of the musical structure. Interestingly, there is a Wrocław thread in the history of the Dvořák Concerto – its first edition was published in 1883 by the Wrocław publishing house of Julius Hainauer.