The year 1892 was to Johannes Brahms maybe as unprecedented, maddening and bewildering a year as 2024 was to many of us sitting in the audience today. He was getting increasingly disillusioned by the political turmoil within the disintegrating Hapsburg empire, the relentless forward march of technology (he didn’t particularly care for the new electric lights installed in his apartment) and the general direction the musical world was taking (scoffing at Bruckner’s receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna: “  … that a totally uncultured man is made a doctor, that’s really pretty hard …!”) He lost his longtime friend and confidante, Elisabet von Herzogenberg, and his beloved sister Elise. Relations with Clara Schumann were also strained, due to a vehement disagreement about the version of her husband Robert’s D Minor Symphony that Brahms allowed to be published. In short: It is no wonder that from this point onward, he was no longer interested in large compositions or bold projects. As we can hear distinctly in the Fantaisies, the Brahms of 1892 was composing for himself alone. 

In the three hundred-plus years since its composition, there are few instruments for which Bach’s Chaconne in D minor has not been arranged. Originally intended for the solo violin, there have since been saxophone, organ, marimba and guitar transcriptions, orchestral arrangements, a transcription for violin and four voices, and not one but two piano transcriptions for only the left hand. Whichever version you’re familiar with or used to prefer … I’m fairly confident that after today’s performance, Busoni’s piano transcription will be near the top of your list. To my ears, and I hope to yours, there is something about his lush, sensuous harmonization that bores straight to the heart of Bach and amplifies its essence more acutely than a new set of B&W speakers. 

There is a profound satisfaction, I think, to be had in a recital of duets and two-piano pieces, something that PPI offers every now and then. In today’s program, we get to hear some of the best repertory from those two genres. In the proceedings we get to reflect on a time when music was available to anyone only in live performance (Schubert) and to explore modern music with many sources of inspiration (all the others.)

Readers of these notes hardly have need of a reminder that all “great” music came about as the result of a composer’s most ardent, urgent response to inspiration, the whole of it tempered necessarily by hard study, obedience to certain rules of a particular tradition and pedagogy, and devotion to both emotional release and getting it all down on paper! Too often, as well, composers and performers have had to struggle with exceptional challenges in their personal and/or compositional lives, but, amazingly, still came through with music of great power. Stories about exactly that abound in music history.

What do all the pieces on Eric Lu’s program have in common? Like the young man at the keyboard, the composers of these great works were (relatively) young people: Although Bach lived to the ripe old age of 65, he was only 17 when he composed his soulful Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, BWV 992. Schubert composed his famous Impromptus at age 30; Mendelssohn wrote his 48 “Songs without words” at various times during his life – but he died well before his 40th birthday, as did the poetic genius Chopin. An “old soul”, the internet will tell you, is “someone who resonates deeply with the past and has a strong sense of wisdom beyond his years. One who feels displaced from mainstream society. One who values and recognizes the depth of even the littlest of things.” Does this also describe the composers listed above? To a T! Does it beg for a deeper discussion of music as a timeless, age-defying power? Most definitely!

Now having had the opportunity to delve deeply into the marvelous Ms. Cann’s own journey with today’s music, and having learned that she, too – a multi-award-winning virtuoso trained at the finest conservatories on the continent – only discovered this music in 2016 (!), I am feeling confident that admitting the gaps in my education, and sharing what I’ve learned along the way, is the best possible route to bringing you, our audience, to the same incredible feeling of serendipity that I’ve had the joy of experiencing.

In today’s program, we are invited to explore the diverse ways in which the ordinary is made extraordinary by three distinctly different, yet similarly virtuoso composers. From 1820s Vienna to pre-Revolution Russia: Listen how pianistic fireworks transform the mundane into magic.

In today’s program, we are invited to explore the diverse ways in which the ordinary is made extraordinary by three distinctly different, yet similarly virtuoso composers. From 1820s Vienna to pre-Revolution Russia: Listen how pianistic fireworks transform the mundane into magic.