Brahms Piano Works Volume Two – Barry Douglas

Barry Douglas has never been a pianist who flatters an audience, and thank goodness for that. There’s a granite quality to his Brahms — you feel it in the very first bars of the Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, op. 5, that huge, hammering unison statement that Brahms hurled onto the page as a twenty-year-old trying to prove something to Schumann, to Liszt, to himself. Douglas doesn’t soften it. He leans into the weight.

This is the second installment of what promises to be a substantial cycle, and Douglas continues the odd but apparently unavoidable practice of atomizing Brahms’s own carefully assembled opus groupings. I understand the logic of programming — you want contrast, you want a big piece flanked by miniatures — but there’s something faintly perverse about scattering the op. 116 pieces and the op. 10 ballades across multiple discs like a museum that’s deaccessioned half its permanent collection. Anyone wanting the complete Opp. 116–119 in sequence will need to do some reshuffling on their own playlist. A small grievance, but a real one.

The sonata, though — the sonata is the thing here, and it’s a killer of a piece to program because it demands nearly everything: the octave-strength of a young virtuoso, the harmonic patience of late Brahms avant la lettre, and an architect’s sense of how five movements (five! — Brahms never did this again) hang together as a single arc rather than a suite of unrelated episodes. Calum MacDonald’s booklet note floats the idea that this sonata was written in some sense against Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, which Brahms had heard the older composer play shortly before putting pen to paper. It’s a tantalizing thought — two mid-century titans, same one-movement-versus-multi-movement problem, arriving at opposite solutions — and Douglas’s performance, whether he had that narrative in mind or not, certainly plays like an argument. The first movement doesn’t relax so much as brace itself, again and again, for the next onslaught.

What struck me on repeated listenings was how unmarked and yet how right so many of Douglas’s tempo adjustments feel. Brahms’s own scores are notoriously stingy with expressive instruction compared to, say, Chopin’s — much is left to intuition, to a kind of inherited interpretation practice going back through Backhaus, through Kempff, through Brahms’s own circle. Douglas eases back at moments the printed page doesn’t ask him to, and I found myself nodding along rather than reaching for a red pen. The development section of the first movement in particular has real ferocity, but it’s a controlled ferocity — nothing splashes over the rim.

The Andante espressivo brings relief, as it must, and Douglas plays it with an unforced, songful tenderness — that famous epigraph from the anonymous love poem practically breathing between the phrases. Near the close, in the Andante molto section, his tone thins to something almost vaporous; a lesser pianist would have pushed harder for effect here, but Douglas trusts the music’s own quietness. The scherzo bounds along with real physical excitement, all sinew, though the trio unbends into something genuinely graceful, even courtly.

Then comes the fourth movement — the “Rückblick,” the backward glance — and this is where the release earns its keep. It’s a strange, unsettling piece of writing, more Mahler than Mahler in some ways, with those funereal bass figures thudding under a fragile melodic line borrowed from the slow movement. Douglas doesn’t oversell the morbidity. He lets the tread do the work. It’s genuinely haunting, and I’d put this movement up against most rivals on record — Kovacevich, Lupu, even Gilels in his EMI traversal — for sheer atmospheric control.

The finale, with its chorale-like interruptions and shifting moods, closes the work with the kind of hard-won triumph that never feels cheap, and Douglas navigates its structural sprawl with a clear head even when his hands are working overtime.

The shorter pieces that round out the disc are well chosen if inevitably fragmentary given the extraction problem I mentioned above. The two ballades — op. 10, no. 2, and op. 10, no. 3, the latter subtitled “Intermezzo” — get performances of real character, the second especially, with its hushed, almost improvisatory trio section. The op. 118 ballade has bite. Among the intermezzi, op. 117, no. 2, unfolds with a lovely covered tone, the kind of sound that suggests felt hammers wrapped in silk, while op. 116, no. 6 has an autumnal glow that I found genuinely moving — this is late Brahms at his most inward, and Douglas resists any temptation to varnish it with sentiment.

Is this a Brahms cycle to set beside Kempff’s mono classic, or Gilels’ unfinished but towering survey, or the more recent, glacially probing work of Radu Lupu in the shorter pieces? Perhaps not quite — Douglas’s tone occasionally turns steely under pressure, and there’s a bluntness to his fortissimos that won’t be to every taste. But as an ongoing document of a formidable pianist thinking seriously, and thinking freshly, about music he’s clearly lived with for decades, this volume is entirely persuasive. I’ll be watching for volume three.