Program Note:

Summer 2023. A good French meal nearly demolished sitting between us, family (musical and otherwise) discussed, the unending conversation about life and art recommenced. “You promise that there will be no xylophone, right?” asked maestro Platt, only very slightly over half-way serious, fork poised in midair. He had just asked me to dream on the idea of crafting an arrangement for the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra of Johannes Brahms’ great Opus 34, the final iteration of which – after the original quartet version had been withdrawn and turned first into a sonata for two pianos before being recast a second time for piano quintet – was premiered in 1866.

Alexander reminded me that we first met at a New Haven Symphony rehearsal of Schoenberg’s 1937 orchestration of Brahms’ First Piano Quartet led by his mentor Murray Sidlin in February 1986 by the Symphony. I immediately recalled that I (who had not heard the arrangement before) had at the time looked up at him in shock at the point at which a xylophone entered, so out of character was it. Otto Klemperer is said to have liked Schoenberg’s arrangement so much that he declared, “You can’t even hear the original quartet, so beautiful is the arrangement.” 25-year-old me, arrogant in my youth, declared to Alexander, “that’s the moment when Schoenberg’s temerity is revealed—a xylophone? Really?”

Consequently, thirty-seven years later, extremely reluctant, I told Alexander that I would dream on it; but, inside my own head I had already said no. A year went by. Again, we faced each other over a demolished meal at the same restaurant. “So,” asked the maestro, “are you up to the challenge?” I told him that I was. What had changed? Over the course of the intervening year I had come to view Brahms’ great Opus 34 as a musical / historic inflection point—so musically sturdy, so filled with past, present, and future—that even the slightest instrumental nudge one way foreshadows the music Mahler would compose in only a few years; an instrumental nudge in another direction brought Beethoven back to life.

So how did I muster the temerity to approach the project? I sublimated my so-called “creative ego / voice” and used my skills as an orchestrator to join Brahms not in the sacred moment of inspired creation that is rightly between him and his inner voice, but in the conduit of expressing those musical ideas. I was honored to spend what I feel in retrospect was 90 percent of my time executing (based on his very clear orchestral style as it comes to us in his published symphonic works) an orchestration as he would, and 10% of my time making subtle “pushes” toward the way that Mahler would dress the same ideas a decade later, or Beethoven a few years earlier, and, yes, how the young Schoenberg might have stressed a dissonance more than another set of ears. And then, with the slightest addition of a doubling here or there, or the elimination of a traditional woodwind underpinning elsewhere, the gestalt of Schubert might emerge, and then evaporate; Schubert, whose ghost I somehow sensed in nearly every transition.  It was my honor to celebrate Brahms’ genius, to have spent the summer months of 2024 as a pilgrim enmeshed in the warp and woof of a work so filled with wisdom, yet so unaware of the human-driven disasters that would soon sweep over Europe and the world.

Read an essay about the process of orchestrating this work here.

Selected Review:

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