Throughout his 60-year career as a composer, Robin Holloway’s own music has regularly been in a dialogue with the past. His early success in the 1970s came through a series of chamber and orchestral pieces that took works by Schumann as their raw material, and at various times subsequently the music of Wagner and Weill, Bach and Schubert have served as triggers for his prodigious productivity.
Alongside these borrowings, Holloway has paid more conventional homage to composers he admires with arrangements, even though the point at which simple transcription ends and his own invention takes over is sometimes hard to define. In his notes to this collection from the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Mann, Holloway lists no less than 15 composers, from Bach to Britten, whose works he has “opened out, reverently enhanced, spread more widely”, to use his own phrase.
Of the two works by Brahms “opened out” here, one, the F minor Piano Quintet Op 34 seems an obvious candidate for such an expansion, though the other perhaps is less likely. That’s the Variations on a Theme of Schumann Op 23 for piano; Holloway treats the 10 variations with delicacy and tact, rendering them generally in pastel orchestral colours. But he can’t resist adding an epilogue of his own “to bring closer to the surface the latent grief and bitterness that the original eschews”, and on the disc the variations are followed by his transcriptions for small orchestra of Schumann’s own Canonic Studies Op 56 for pedal piano, or more accurately of Debussy’s two-piano arrangements of those exquisite miniatures.
Yet it is the sweeping muscularity of the piano quintet, a work that began life as a string quintet and then became a sonata for two pianos before reaching its final form, which rightly dominates this disc; Holloway compares his arrangement with Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet Op 25, but his treatment is much more sober; he transforms the quintet into utterly convincing, minor-key symphonic Brahms, so that the disc’s description of the result as “Symphony in F minor Op 34” seems entirely justified.
This week’s other pick
There’s more repurposed Brahms on a Brilliant Classics disc from Matteo Fossi, Duccio Ceccanti and Vittorio Ceccanti, which pairs his String Sextets Op 18 and Op 36 in versions for piano trio. The arrangements were made at the composer’s behest by Theodor Kirchner, who was regarded as the finest arranger of his time and Brahms himself subsequently revised and approved them. Played with tremendous verve and warmth by Fossi and the Ceccantis they make wonderfully involving listening, and the biggest compliment one can pay Kirchner for his skill is that none of the sweep and lyrical power of what are two of Brahms’s most glorious chamber works has been lost in the process.
