Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 3 and Handel Variations – Plowright

There is a moment about four minutes into the opening movement where Jonathan Plowright simply refuses to let the music bloom the way you expect it to. The harmony wants to open its arms. He keeps them folded. It’s a small thing. It’s also the key to everything that follows.

Brahms was twenty years old when he wrote this sonata, and it still astonishes me that a young man barely out of Hamburg, fresh from Schumann’s living room and that famous, fatal proclamation in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik — “Neue Bahnen,” new paths, the young eagle come to save German music — could produce something so architecturally vast. Five movements. A piano piece that keeps threatening to become an orchestra, then a string quartet, then a funeral cortege, then subsides into a kind of private nocturne before roaring back for a finale that never quite resolves its own contradictions. Pianists have been arguing about how to play it for a hundred and fifty years, and they will keep arguing.

Plowright, on the evidence of this BIS release, wants none of the plush. Where Radu Lupu — still my touchstone in this repertoire, and I suspect a lot of other critics’ too — leans into the bass, lets chords ring past their notated value, stretches a phrase until it aches, Plowright plays what’s on the page. Literally, almost defiantly so. Those hammered final beats in the opening theme, which most pianists round off into something fatter and more grateful to the hand, come out clipped, almost brusque. Murray Perahia, on his old Sony disc, gives you the plush version, chords like upholstered furniture. Plowright gives you the wood underneath.

Does it work? Mostly, yes. When it doesn’t, it’s still interesting, which counts for a great deal in Brahms.

The slow movement is where he takes his real risk. Andante espressivo, Brahms marks it, with that touching epigraph from a Sternau poem about two hearts united in love, and Plowright takes it to nearly fourteen minutes, a good ninety seconds beyond Lupu. This could easily curdle into sentimentality. It doesn’t. There’s a rapt, almost trance-like quality to his voicing here, the melody floated above a bass that never overreaches, more late Beethoven — the Moonlight‘s cousin, not its imitator — than the overheated, symphonic rhetoric some pianists bring to this page. You feel Brahms reaching for Mahler before Mahler existed, and Plowright, wisely, doesn’t push him the rest of the way there.

I go back and forth on the pedaling. There are stretches, the second half of the scherzo especially, where the dryness borders on austerity, where I wanted just a little more resonance in the hall, a little more sustain to blur the edges Brahms occasionally wants blurred. This is a young man’s piece, full of hormonal excess as well as structural ambition, and there are moments where Plowright’s scrupulousness reads less as clarity than as reticence. Lupu’s willingness to bend a rhythm, to let a phrase overstay its welcome by half a beat, produces a more overtly Romantic, more “pianistic” experience: gorgeous, sometimes indulgent, unmistakably a virtuoso’s reading. Plowright’s is cooler, more structural. You hear the bones of the thing.

The Handel Variations, which close the disc, suit his temperament rather better, I think. This is Brahms the contrapuntist, Brahms the museum-goer who spent his Sundays poring over old scores. The piece grew out of his study of a Handel harpsichord suite and was, famously, a birthday gift for Clara Schumann in 1861, who called it “truly gigantic” and played it with tremendous authority herself. Twenty-five variations and a fugue build from Baroque poise to something approaching Lisztian bravura, and Plowright navigates the transformation with unfussy authority. The siciliano variation has real tenderness, the Hungarian-flavored ones real snap and swagger, and the concluding fugue accumulates weight without ever turning to sludge. That’s not nothing; I’ve heard pianists drown in those contrapuntal lines.

Sound engineering from BIS is exemplary, as usual: the piano captured with real presence but without harshness, some air around the sound rather than the studio-dry closeness that afflicts too many piano recordings these days.

Is this a Sonata No. 3 to displace Lupu, or Kovacevich, or for that matter Gilels in his old Melodiya account? No. But it doesn’t need to be. It stakes out its own position: leaner, more classically minded, occasionally austere but never dull, a reading that trusts Brahms’s notation over the accumulated performance tradition that has grown up around it like ivy. That’s a legitimate choice, argued with conviction. Recommended, with the reservation that those wanting the plush symphonic Brahms of legend should look elsewhere first, and then come back to this account for the corrective.