The Brahms Project. Emmanuel Ax and Anne Sophie von Otter in concert Zellerbach UCB Thursday

Anne Sophie Von Otter and Emmanuel Ax 

We had front row first tier, excellent seat!     Emmanuel Ax is promoting two new composers from NYC in his Brahms program part of his Brahms project. .  He remarked in an interview that he normally does not accompany voice, but it was a pleasure working with his choice: Frederica Von Stade.    Fredericka Von Stade acknowledges her Swedish heritage in singing one song, which is Serbian, transl into Swedish, which is popular, and also in German, by Brahms. Tor Aulin.  Til en rose (1903)   

 

The composers from NYC  are Nico Muhly(1981)” So many Things, an interpretation of Joyce Carol Oates poem in which woman walks into glass, which shatters and kills her, and of a Cavafy poem   The other composer, a woman, who is present, or  Missy Maaoli, has created  “Bolts of Loving Thunder “  employing a line from a John Ashberry poem,”Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”,  and has been simply inspired by Brahms.

 

 More than half of Brahms’  works are vocal works.  Folksongs, canons, psalms, and choral pieces performed in Vienna and Germany as the “texted  music is in the sound of the human voice.”  Brahm’s only “job” was in choral conducting.  There are  200 songs and about 100 folk songs, in which the  primacy of the voice and the melodic line are consistent. Brahms liked the lyricism of folk songs.  The  piano  provides a richly harmonized counterpoint to the melody; clarity of form; along with integration of voice and accompaniment.  Brahms compositions are musical and expressive, not poetic or philosophical.  He held that the more perfect the poem the less chance for the music to enhance it!  He chose poems that  would inspire music:  Goethe...lesser to Hebbel, Daumer, Geibel...and the resulting songs are only equalled only by Schubert, and  Schumann.     “While Brahms does not contribute markedly to an intensifying the ideals of musico-poetic relationships in the Romantic era, he most assuredly does make a significant contribution to the repertory of song.”  From the program notes 2014 by Dr. Richard E Rodda.      

 

Emmanuel Ax has invited Anne Sophie Von Otter, and Yo Yo Ma to join him in this Brahms project  Brahms song repertoire is certainly not as well known as Mahler’s.   Readers will recall that Brahms was the lifelong friend of Clara Schulman.

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