Johannes Brahms, that flat-out Romantic who chose classical models for his compositional offspring.
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
The Vancouver Recital Society presents Brahms Fest
When and where: Nov. 3, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Vancouver Playhouse
The epithet “autumnal” is often applied to the music of Johannes Brahms, and this fall classical fans have a one-day treat in store: The Vancouver Recital Society offers two different concerts Sunday, Nov. 3, with a complement of some eight favourite VRS performers doing the honours.
VRS stakeholders have come to expect ultra-focused programs as a regular bonus. Last season there was a multi-concert event featuring Schubert piano sonatas played by Paul Lewis. In prior seasons we were offered all 15 Shostakovich string quartets, and a Schubertiad showcasing late works by that tragic figure. This year it’s time — some might say, about time — to shine the spotlight on Brahms, that flat-out Romantic who chose classical models for his compositional offspring.
The plan for these two special concerts recalls the halcyon days of the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, which invited a cadre of like-minded performers and let them loose to mix and match programs within a short, intense rehearsal period. The core of the Brahmsfest 2024 performers is the Castalian String Quartet, resident at Oxford University, and heard here in 2018 and 2022. Add in two more exceptional young string players: violist Timothy Ridout, who wowed us in his Canadian debut in 2023, and cellist Zlatomir Fung, who performed that same season. Then round out the complement of performers with a pair of pianists, Benjamin Hochman and perennial Vancouver favourite Angela Cheng. For the extra keen, throw in a couple of pre-concert talks (full disclosure: I’m on tap for these), and you have a plan.
Choosing repertoire is always a complicated business, but the pair of programs have come together efficiently. The midafternoon concert starts out with two duo sonatas. Hocman and Ridout kick things off with the wonderful E flat Sonata for Viola — well, originally written for clarinet, but so extraordinary on the viola — dating from the very end of Brahms’s creative life. Then, in a gambit that really hearkens back to the Chamber Music Festival days, there’s a novelty: the G major Violin Sonata (dating from 1879) but in an adaptation for cello and piano, essayed by Fung and Cheng.
The concluding showpiece of the afternoon program is Brahms’s G major Sextet, which gives away the persuasive rationale behind the selection of artists. Brahms wrote two sextets for pairs of fiddles, violas, and cellos. These don’t get nearly the attention they deserve because of practical logistics: extra performers mean extra expense, and most string quartets have lots and lots of great music to perform as it is. Here we get to enjoy both sextets.
The evening concert begins with a light pick-me-up of sorts: a selection of waltzes for four hands, one piano. With a breezy post-prandial mood established, the waltzes are followed by the exuberant, exhilarating First String Sextet, the earliest work on the docket and as non-autumnal a delight as you can get. The mini-festival concludes with Brahms’s Piano Quintet, a breakthrough piece most Brahms authorities argue marks the beginning of his compositional maturity.
Both programs offer no end of variety, and the well-chosen trajectory of the two concerts should be impressive. While there are works from over three decades of the composer’s life, these are not presented in chronological order but as time travel between phases of his work. As regulars know about these classical equivalents of binge listening, (horrible term!), the whole of the experience is inevitably greater than the sum of the parts.