Brahms and Dvorak Dances – Brendel and Klien

Two Viennese pianists, a pile of gypsy tunes borrowed and burnished, and sound quality that time forgot to update. None of it matters once the playing starts.

Brahms never wrote the Hungarian Dances as concert showpieces for himself; he arranged them, mostly, from tunes he picked up secondhand — some genuinely Hungarian, some not, a fact that got him into an embarrassing plagiarism dispute in 1874 with a Hungarian bandleader named Kéler Béla. He didn’t much care. The tunes were good. He knew it. Dvořák knew it too, which is why his own Slavonic Dances of 1878 exist at all. Simrock, the publisher, wanted a sequel to the Brahms cash cow, and got one, except Dvořák’s dances are not arrangements of anything. They’re original tunes dressed up as folklore, which is either more honest or more devious depending on how you want to think about it.

Brendel and Klien recorded this repertoire toward the end of the 1950s, years before Brendel became the Brendel of legend: the cerebral Schubertian, the Beethoven sage with the owlish demeanor and the prose style to match. Here he’s simply a young Viennese pianist having fun, and Klien, a somewhat underrated artist who never quite got his due outside Austria, matches him stride for stride. This is four-hand playing of real unanimity. You can hear it in the little accelerandos that arrive together, unforced, as though both players felt the tug of the dance floor at exactly the same instant. Ensemble playing at the piano is a strange, intimate business. Two people, one instrument, eighty-eight keys to share, and if the chemistry isn’t there you get politeness instead of dancing. There’s no politeness here. There’s abandon, tempered by a very Viennese sense of where the barline actually falls.

The Hungarian Dances go by in a blur of czardas energy. Dance no. 5 in F-sharp minor snaps off with real bite, and the famous no. 1 in G minor has swagger without vulgarity, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Too many pianists turn these into salon trinkets, sentimental and slow. Brendel and Klien do not sentimentalize. They also do not linger: tempos throughout are brisk, sometimes almost breathless, and a fair number of repeats vanish so the whole business fits comfortably onto old LP sides. You lose some structural weight. You gain propulsion. Fair trade, mostly.

The Dvořák — just the op. 46 set, the first eight, not the later op. 72 — comes off with comparable zest, though here I miss just slightly the sinewy, dark-grained lyricism that Czech pianists, Firkušný above all, bring instinctively to this music. Brendel and Klien play it beautifully, but as Central European music seen from Vienna rather than Prague. Dance no. 8 in G minor has terrific rhythmic snap; the furiant character comes through clean.

Now, the sound. It’s from 1957–59, and it shows its age unapologetically. There’s a boxy, slightly distant quality, as if the piano were recorded through a not-quite-open door down the hall. Somebody has scrubbed away the surface noise, thankfully, so there’s no crackle, no pre-echo ghosting, just a persistent muffled quality, warm but veiled, like listening through a scrim. It won’t compete with a modern digital piano album for presence or bite. It asks patience.

You forgive it fast, though. Within a few dances the ear adjusts, the way it adjusts to an old photograph’s sepia tone, and what you’re left with is exceptional, idiomatic music-making, generous in spirit, light on its feet, never precious. Anyone wanting these two piano-duet cycles complete — the Brahms in full, the Dvořák in its original set — in one inexpensive sitting, played by musicians who clearly liked each other and liked this music, need not hunt further. It isn’t the last word in fidelity. It may be very close to the last word in charm.