By centering on the late piano music (c. 1892-93) of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Orli Shaham organizes works influencing his style as well as recent compositions written in response to the Brahms oeuvre. Brahms himself has 13 pieces, mostly Intermezzos, with an occasional Romance, Rhapsody, and Ballade. The latter forms owe debts to Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin, while the music of J.S. Bach remains vital to them all.
The 6 Pieces, Op. 118 are dedicated to Clara Schumann. They are introspective and lyrical, even dramatically compact, like the Ballade in G Minor, Op. 118/3. The Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118/2 projects a rainy-day nostalgia. No. 4 in F Minor employs top-note, canon effects. The Intermezzo in E-flat Minor, Op. 118/6 cites the Dies Irae sequence from the Latin Requiem Mass.
Schubert inherited the form of the Impromptu from Czech music, refining the lyrical, romantic impulses as his own, especially in the G-flat Major, D. 899/3 (1827). Schumann’s Romance in Major, Op. 28/2 (1838) Written on 3 staves, the melody appears in the middle, surrounded by mirror arpeggios in either hand. The Chopin Berceuse (lullaby) in D-flat Major, Op. 57 (1844) is a study in harmonic-rhythm in the form of 6 variations over a repeated bass.
Brahms called his 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117 “lullabies of my sorrows” and “old bachelor music.” The No. 1 in E-flat Major cites an old Scottish folk tune, which Brahms knew in translation by Herder. No. 2 in B-flat
Minor, with a middle section in D-flat Major, is set in ternary, A-B-A form. The most emotionally agitated is No. 3 in C# Minor, with its post-WW I sensibility, almost like Kurt Weill. Its middle section is in A Major.
Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955) wrote his My Inner Brahms as a direct series of variants on the Brahms Op. 118/6 in modern, sometimes bitonal style.
J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-flat Major (1725) sets the ground plan for a suite of 6 movements based on dance forms. Brahms knew Bach’s music well and patterned his compressed works in the same manner,
often borrowing Bach’s contrapuntal procedures. The third of Bach’s suite, the Corrente, is a quick-moving dance imitated in Brahms Op. 118.4. Arnold Schoenberg composed his 6 Little Piano Pieces in 1911, after the manner of Brahms, but in compressed and harmonically liberated form. Tiny music gestures assume a large dimension by being held in time, and the last of these projects a funeral-bells image related to the death in 1911 of Schoenberg’s idol, Gustav Mahler.
Avner Dorman is an Israeli-born composer whose composition, After Brahms – 3 Intermezzos, pays homage to the assorted Brahms pieces. The first two make use of intervals from the Brahms Intermezzo in B Minor, Op. 119/1. The last is a free- form improvisation in octaves and competing metrics of two versus three. Shaham juxtaposes the 4 Klavierstuecke, Op. 119 of Brahms immediately against the Hommage a Brahms by Brett Dean. His four pieces come between the individual Brahms pieces and allude to other works by Brahms as well, like his G Major Violin Sonata and Second Piano Concerto.