David Hattner’s PYP Playlist

Posted on September 9, 2019

PYP Musical Director David Hattner shares what’s currently on his playlist. Revamp your own playlist with selections from our PYP Playlist on his Twitter every #MusicMonday.

This season, PYP will prepare and perform the 4th Symphony of Brahms for our March 7th concert. The Symphonies of Brahms have an interesting history with the Portland Youth Philharmonic. The first performance of any Brahms Symphony was the 4th on December 3rd, 1927. In total the orchestra has given only 12 performances of Symphonies by Brahms. We will give the lucky 13th!

For this month, I want to put forward a few more unusual recordings of this final Symphony by the great old master. But let’s start with an analysis of the piece by Leonard Bernstein. This analysis was once included with a recording of the piece that Bernstein conducted in the 1950s distributed by the book-of-the-month club. This popular mail-order club made and distributed quite a few recordings of great music, usually performed by the leading musicians of the time. This talk is sophisticated, yet approachable for any listener curious about how such a complicated piece is put together.

For a performance of the Symphony, I want to highlight two recordings by conductors who were active while Brahms was alive and whose conducting Brahms heard. First, Max Fiedler (1859-1939).  Fiedler was a most distinguished musician, even becoming an early conductor of the Boston Symphony (1908-1912). His way with this music is unusual by today’s standards, especially regarding tempo. The pulse of the music is truly flexible. While performances of the music of Brahms today tend to manipulate the tempo by slowing down at major emphatic points, Fiedler moves both slower and faster (often quite dramatically) frequently. I believe this sort of performance practice was fairly standard during the composer’s lifetime and is likely a reason Brahms refused to enter any metronome markings into his scores.

A note, this presentation of Fiedler’s recording does not remove some repeated notes played during ‘side changes’ of the old recording format.

Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) was one of the most remarkable musicians of his time. He studied the piano with Franz Liszt and was distinguished as pianist, conductor and teacher. He also composed a long list of works. His orchestral transcriptions of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue are still performed. He also made one of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata which can be heard on YouTube. It would be great to hear this transcription on a concert some day!

Weingartner lived long enough to make many recordings, including the first complete cycle of Beethoven Symphonies. His Brahms Symphony recordings are important documents, and represent a very different, more modern style than Fiedler. Generally, these recordings are swifter in approach than is common today.

Stay tuned,