Brahms: Waltzes (16), Op. 39

Leon McCawley has made Brahms’ Handel Variations into a piece of his very own . His individual thoughts on the music bear the hallmark of a mature artist who has the means and talent to express them, as demonstrated by this recording. The work is a summit of Brahms’ keyboard works.

The conductor, the singers and the pianists lend this recording a remarkable authenticity. The instrument used is a historic Erard fortepiano (Paris, 1839).

Fifty years ago on a country road near Arundel, Sussex, a car unaccountably left the road and hit a tree, killing all three of the vehicle's occupants. One of the passengers in the car was Richard Farrell. Richard was just starting an amazing career as a concert pianist. In 1956 he made what was to be his last tour of New Zealand. By this time he was tackling some of the mountain-peaks of the pianistic repertoire in his programmes - things like the Brahms F Minor Sonata and the "Handel" Variations, Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit", Chopin's Op.10 Etudes, and some Liszt transcriptions and paraphrases. As well, with the New Zealand National Orchestra, whose work with conductor James Robertson he praised, he played the "Emperor", and the Ravel Left-Hand Concerto. That same year Farrell had commenced what seemed a highly promising recording career in England with Pye Records, beginning with a coupling of the Grieg and Liszt E-flat concertos in which he was partnered by the Halle Orchestra under George Weldon. These two concertos are on this recording.

It must have come as quite a shock to those who had known Brahms as only a composer of serious music – notably three piano sonatas, the first piano concerto and the monumental Paganini and Handel variations – to experience the collection of 16 Waltzes published in 1866 when the composer was 33. They were probably begun ten years earlier and form an album of memories reminiscent, in their variety of colour, of the different places in which he had first heard them – Hungarian, Tyrolean and even Nordic picked up no doubt from the sailors who frequented the bars in Hamburg where the composer played to earn a living. The Liebeslieder followed three years later and were originally set for vocal quartet and piano duet; five years later they were published without the vocal parts. The Hungarian Dances were composed and published over a period of eleven or twelve years ending 1870, Brahms orchestrated three of them in 1873. Brahms recommended Dvorák, eight years his junior, to his publisher, Simrock, in 1877 and the following year duly published the first set of Slavonic Dances which they commissioned. The second set followed eight years later. Both sets were originally composed for piano duet and later orchestrated. These recordings are one of the many that Beroff and Collard have made together.

The product of close study of Gypsy folklore, the Hungarian Dances were originally destined for piano four hands; they were subsequently orchestrated, but Brahms himself also made a reduction for piano solo. Cédric Tiberghien has chosen to complete his third Brahms programme with the eight Piano Pieces Op.76, and the 16 Waltzes Op.39, which offer a highly personal vision of the genre, in the tradition of Schubert and Schumann.

Notwithstanding foxtrot, calypso, rock and rap, the waltz continues to express the way the world goes around. On their splendid 1892 Pleyel, recorded at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Jan Michiels and Inge Spinette invite us to follow them on an exceptional course, where Schubert, Brahms, R. Strauss and Ravel are interspersed with Wolfgang Rihm’s delectable Kurze Walzer.