Brahms had just turned forty-eight when he began applying the finishing touches to his second piano concerto, an activity which dominated the months of spring and early summer of 1881 and which thus dates securely within one of the most untroubled and relaxed periods of his life. Personally as well as publicly, his affairs had been going well, since, during recent years, his clumsily unintentioned but irascibly sharp tongue had alienated comparatively few friends either among a legion of those newly-acquired or that handful which had remained long-termed and doggedly loyal in their sometimes strained relationships with him. In fact, he had actually begun to bask in the warmth of the sort of sustaining friendships which his genuinely generous nature should have drawn for him formerly, but which bumbling sarcasm and a kind of mastodonic gruffness had often precluded. Of late, he had also learned to take both life and composing just a bit less seriously, even to the extent of "letting go" and hying off, after the bleakness and bustle of northern winters, to "enjoy the miracle of an Italian spring," meantime contenting himself to let notes fall upon manuscript "when and will they must." The fact that Brahms’s position as one of the most important composers of his time was already established beyond cavilling probably lay at the very heart of the reason behind the untroubledness of this period of his life. The reasons for his slowness in maturing into mastery are too many to detail in the space at hand. Prime among them, of course, lies the fact that Brahms was congenitally a painstakingly slow, ruminative sort of creative craftsman. But hovering above all remains the weighty factor of the very burden of responsibility for "the future of music" which the Schumanns, Liszts. and Joachims had assigned to him. At first, each new work of Brahms’s was automatically an all-too public test of his abilities, watched for with lively interest by the musically informed circles of Germany and Austria-Hungary—with many members of those cliquish. cabalistic circles more desirous of hearing the young man fail than fulfill. Then, as accomplishment piled upon accomplishment, the situation grew to the point that noted Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick could open a review of the 1876 premiere of Brahms’s first symphony accurately with the statement : "Seldom, if ever, has the entire musical world awaited a composer's first symphony with such tense anticipation.” Such was the success of that symphony, however, that many of even the most stubborn of Brahms’s detractors could no longer carp about the power of the individualistic techniques which he had developed in his self-announced, controversial retreat back from contemporary "romantic" tendencies toward a "new classicism" where he might find himself "a place in Beethoven's domain of art." The levelling sweep of the first symphony, impelled further by the cordial reception of a second two years later, provided a most significant pivot point in Brahms’s life and career...
Edward Cole (from the original Liner Notes)
Gina Bachauer
Plays
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Tracks
Piano Concerto n° 2 in B-Flat major, Op. 83
5 I. Allegro non troppo 16:26
6 II. Allegretto appassionato 8:33
7 III. Andante 10:09
8 IV. Allegretto grazioso 8:49
*
Gina Bachauer - p
Kenneth Heath - vlc solo [# 3]
London Symphony Orchestra/Stanislaw Skrowaczewsky - dir.
Recorded ca 1962