This two-CD set, produced by Allan Evans, presents performances and verbal accounts by pianists connected with Brahms, recorded between 1903 and 1951. Four were students of Clara Schumann. Austrian Marie Baumayer (1851–1931) taught members of the aristocratic Wittgenstein family in Vienna, and performed publicly, including with violinist Marie Soldat-Roeger. Hungarian Ilona Eibenschütz (1872–1967), one of Brahms’s favourite pianists, premiered several of his late piano pieces in London. British pianist Edith Heymann (1872–1960) studied with Schumann in 1894, as did the German Carl Friedberg (1872–1955) in the mid-1880s. Friedberg worked with eminent baritone Julius Stockhausen and performed with major European and American orchestras. He accepted a post at Juilliard in 1923 and founded the Trio of New York in 1938 with Daniil Karpilovsky and Felix Salmond. Australian pianist Bruce Hungerford studied with Friedberg in New York for four years and taped 15 of their lessons in 1951–52. Hungarian pianist Etelka Freund (1879–1977) had lessons with Brahms in Vienna in 1894 and later became a student of Ferruccio Busoni and friend of the young Béla Bartók. After settling in New York, she performed in an orchestral concert and played live on several radio programmes.

The producer aims to present Brahms as a composer of new music, as he was viewed by his contemporaries. Works of composers Brahms admired – Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann – are also included, and the chronology extended through the career of Etelka Freund to include some of Bartók’s works. The liner notes trace Evans’ journey of discovery sparked by encounters with recordings of Ignaz Friedman, and of Etelka Freund in her son’s New York apartment.Footnote ¹ Evans disdains current classical music performance, particularly of Brahms’s music, playing he calls ‘uniformly plod-ding sonic muck’ made even worse by scholarship, ‘bloated verbiage and analyses that failed to examine relevant sound recordings’. Given the already significant body of published research on early recordings of Brahms’s music, the many early recordings available on disc or YouTube, the application of historical performance techniques by various pianists, and the number of historical recordings that Evans himself has produced for the Pearl and Arbiter labels, his positioning of this CD as a beam of light across an otherwise dark void is bewildering.

Nevertheless, most tracks on this CD will be new to listeners, and there are some real gems. Friedberg, in addition to performing Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, tells of staying out most of the night with Brahms after playing a full evening of his music in Vienna, and turning pages as the composer played his solo piano and chamber works.Footnote ² In a radio talk from 1949, Edith Heymann speaks of lessons with Clara Schumann, discussing voicing, the speed of grace notes, tempo and phrasing, and illustrating points at the piano. She portrays Madame Schumann as an amiable but strict teacher who sometimes reduced students to tears, and she speaks of the ‘spiritual experience’ of hearing Schumann play her arrangements of Bach organ fugues.

The musical performances display a range of individual personalities. In Brahms’s Ballade in G minor op. 118, no. 3, for example, Friedberg delays the downbeat for emphasis whereas Eibenschütz generates momentum by rushing into it. Other highlights include Friedberg’s saucy rendition of Schubert’s Moment musical in F minor (D. 780, no. 3) (recorded September 1948) and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C minor op. 10, no. 1 (recorded c. 1949; identified in the CD contents as Piano Sonata in F); Freund’s sensitive performance of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann op. 9 (recorded in 1959 at age 80), and Rhapsody in E-flat major op. 119, no. 4; and the Trio of New York playing large parts of Brahms’s Op. 8. In Friedberg’s slow movement from Op. 10, one hears instances of dislocation in which the right hand sounds slightly after the left, and an effective timbral distinction between the ornamental passagework in the right hand and the principal melody. Marie Baumayer’s performance of Robert Schumann’s Pedal Etude in A-flat major op. 56, no. 4 is just one example of the elasticity of tempo and textural clarity generally evident in the playing of pianists on these CDs. In the tracks related to teaching, imagery is evoked in order to convey a desired effect, as in Heyman’s account of Clara Schumann’s description of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata as a picture of ‘two sad and serious lovers’ who possess distinct voices; it follows that such extra-musical images continued into the thinking of pianists as they performed. Moreover, as Evans notes, an improvisatory tone is characteristic of the playing of many of these pianists.Footnote ³

Brahms is also directly present on the CD, through his performance of Josef Strauss’s Die Libelle Polka-Mazur, which he recorded on an Edison cylinder in the home of Richard and Maria Fellinger in December 1889.Footnote ⁴ Brahms was excited about the new technology (writing to Clara Schumann that it was ‘like living a fairy tale’), and had practised his Rhapsody in G minor op. 79, no. 2 for the occasion, but he became nervous waiting for the equipment to be set up and launched prematurely into his Hungarian Dance No. 1.Footnote ⁵ Brahms knew Strauss’s dance either from the published piano or orchestral score (both Vienna: C.A. Spina, 1867) or from hearing it live. What he plays is a seemingly off-the-cuff arrangement that paraphrases both the melody and the accompaniment. (The first eight bars of Brahms’s performance are missing from the CD under review.) The texture is fuller, with the melody in octaves and arpeggiated chords added for breadth. Brahms’s tempo is flexible, and he enhances the syncopation by adding notes off the beat. Like other pianists on the CD, he sometimes plays the bass slightly ahead of the treble.Footnote ⁶ Although the quality of the recording is poor, it conveys the freedom with which Brahms drew on his prodigious musical memory.

For listeners wishing to explore issues of performance further, the following resources can serve as an introduction: Pupils of Clara Schumann, Gemm CDS 9904–9 (Pearl Records, 1991); several essays in Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performing Style, ed. Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);Footnote ⁷ Will Crutchfield, ‘Brahms, by Those Who Knew Him’, Opus 2/5 (August 1986): 12–21 and 60, an insightful examination of recordings of Friedberg, Eibenschütz, de Lara and Freund; and Neal Peres Da Costa’s Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), for which early recordings of pianists are a principal source. Peres Da Costa’s book includes a discography and a companion website presenting recordings by some of the pianists featured on Evans’s set. He also applies techniques learned from early recordings – e.g., dislocation between the hands, unnotated arpeggiation and tempo modifications – in his performances on a replica of Brahms’s Streicher piano, both alone and with the ensemble Ironwood. Also of interest is the ongoing work of Kai Köpp and associates at the Hochschule der Künste Bern, who reenact performances on early recordings through a process they call ‘embodiment’.

Brahms: Recaptured by Pupils & Colleagues is a welcome addition to the body of recorded piano music from the first half of the twentieth century. The recordings will spark the imaginations of musicians, scholars and music-lovers interested in gaining new insights into familiar works and experiencing the artistry of some of the tradition’s finest pianists.