It is difficult to avoid creating a narrative writing about music. Even more difficult to avoid creating an autobiographical one, especially when the performer (in this case Barry Douglas) is specific, as he was talking to the R3 presenter, about the connection between this concerto, Robert Schumann's lapse into insanity and Brahms' relationship with Clara.
Not to accept that, though, is to risk writing only for the musically informed, about metronome markings and intricacies in the score. Which is music as frozen architecture.
Better, then, to treat, as I think Douglas and Gergiev actually did in the ninth Prom, music-as-story as metaphor, the concerto as the stormy weather of the soul; and a journey through psychological seasons with weather forecasts that in retrospect (recalling Brahms worked on this concerto for five years) were variable and often suspect and the long-range forecasts particularly unreliable. Just like those on the BBC. . .
The ochestral introduction was almost brutally thunderous; yet Douglas throughout was punchy and fierce, gentle and lyrical, precisely as the emotional temperature demanded, almost, but never in fact, to the point of exaggeration. Much as I feared beforehand he might actually be rather heavy-handed: Douglas is not a pianist who in the past I've always credited with the lightness of touch, or the lyricism of the 'portrait of Clara' in the slow movement, he displayed tonight.
Orchestra and piano were finely balanced: in the Maestoso equally brooding and threatening with hints of rays sunlight; in the Adagio, full of spring rays, distant black clouds, a smell of freshness and probably one of the most delicate, perfect examples of 'pricking stars from heaven's vault' anyone might wish to hear.
And finally, a culmination and resolution; storms, tempests, gales partially in the past, life-affirming sunlight, but nonetheless, in the final cadenza an unmistakeable reminder of the threats such emotional weather as Brahms; relationship with the Schumanns brings with it to the soul. Especially if you are in your twenties.
This was, from both Gergiev and Douglas, a cleverly thought-out performance and supremely executed. It was played unashamedly symphonically in scale, and with the piano played within an inch of its life. Didn't Brahms describe it as 'a symphony with a piano obbligato'? That does imply a certain element of musical schizophrenia, and there was a distinct element of that, deliberately imposed, as though for a moment piano and orchestra were struggling against being antagonistic, in the last movement, the Rondo, before the final climactic resolution. As in fact it had been briefly and perhaps more pointedly in the first movement.
This performance clearly did depend on accepting a narrative; even a narrative as musical metaphor of mental processes, rather than as a deterministic programme, but neatly avoiding the pitfalls of attempting a musical biography.
It would not have suited its first audience, nor its first critic: "this rootimg and rummaging, this dragging and drawing, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes!" Gergiev and Douglas went for all that with terrific gusto and absolutely no smoothing over let alone tentativeness; but with a stylishness, power and utter confidence that arrowed every bar deep into the listeners' hearts.
Douglas said on radio 3, that Brahms' Piano Concerto in D minor is 'an intensely emotional experience that changes people'. Certainly, for this listener, he, Gergiev and the LOS fulfilled the first; whether it was one that would have quite such a transformational effect, I'm not sure. (Though it evidently failed in both endeavours for at least one critic and one lay—I presume—listener.) But you cannot fault them trying to achieve it, or how they tried.
A live performance of this concerto. thoroughly thought out and rigorously executed in its evident aims, really doesn't get much better than this. Not for me, anyway.
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