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Yefim Bronfman

Photo Credit: Felix Broede

Bronfman Plays Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2

Chamber Orchestra of Europe Yefim Bronfman, piano
Orchestral Series
Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
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The Chamber Orchestra of Europe closes its residency with a spellbinding program: Brahms’ luminous Piano Concerto No. 2 performed by Yefim Bronfman, Stravinsky’s sparkling neoclassical Dumbarton Oaks, and Haydn’s joyful Symphony No. 31, the ‘Hornsignal’. 

Featured Artists

Matthias Pintscher

conductor

Yefim Bronfman

piano

Program Highlights

Matthias Pintscher, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano

STRAVINSKY Dumbarton Oaks
HAYDN Symphony No. 31, Hornsignal
BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Program Notes

Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra (Dumbarton Oaks) (1937-38)

(15 minutes)

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)

Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra (Dumbarton Oaks)
     Tempo giusto
     Allegretto
     Con moto
(played without pause)

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss lived at Dumbarton Oaks, a mansion with gardens in Washington, D.C., that served as a social hub for the capital’s elite. To celebrate their 30th anniversary, in 1938, the Blisses commissioned Igor Stravinsky to compose a modestly scaled piece for chamber orchestra of (as the contract put it) “Brandenburg Concerto dimensions.” Stravinsky had conducted Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto in February 1937, and that summer it was apparently still on his mind since he incorporated the motivic cell of that work’s first movement into the new piece. He also echoed the Third Brandenburg Concerto by using three each of violins and violas, just as Bach had, not to mention the richly contrapuntal flavor in the first and third movements. The second movement proved surprisingly spare. Here, brief gestures pass from instrument to instrument, the fragments combining into overarching melodic phrases.

Following the work’s private unveiling in May 1938, Stravinsky conducted it in Paris that June, when the audience adored the piece and demanded that it be encored. The critics were less enthusiastic. Most of their reviews expressed disappointment that this new concerto seemed dry, academic, constrained. It was, in short, not the sort of music that had made such an impact in the early years of Stravinsky’s Ballets Russes collaborations. Otherwise put, the Concerto in E-flat had little in common with The Rite of Spring, which had been performed only two weeks earlier in Paris to mark the 25th anniversary of its premiere and was therefore fresh in everyone’s ears. But Stravinsky had moved on since then. The violinist Samuel Dushkin suggested that Stravinsky continue in the Dumbarton direction and produce an entire group of concertos—a Brandenburg set for the 20th century— but this idea went nowhere.

Symphony No. 31 in D major, Mit dem Hornsignal (With the Horncall) (1765-66)

(25 minutes)

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

Symphony No. 31 in D major, Mit dem Hornsignal (With the Horn-call)
     Allegro
     Adagio
     Menuetto—Trio
     Finale: Moderato molto; Presto

In 1761, Franz Joseph Haydn joined the staff of the powerful Esterházy Court, where he would oversee music for nearly three decades. His orchestra personnel fluctuated, but no change was as dramatic as what occurred between August and December 1763 and again between May 1765 and February 1766, when a full complement of four horn-players joined the ranks. Haydn wrote a pair of symphonies with four horns during each of these windows of opportunity, with Symphony No. 31 being connected to the latter period. Though horns were an important part of the musical soundscape, they rarely came to the fore in orchestral music; they were most encountered in outdoor applications, especially as instruments of the hunt, and their largely unwritten repertoire of signal-calls was passed from one generation to the next through an apprenticeship system.

Haydn shows off the robust sound of his horn choir at the very outset of this symphony, with a theme that incorporates both a hunting signal and a horn-call used to announce postal deliveries. Other instruments take their turns in the spotlight, too—so much so that one might almost view this piece as a sort of sinfonia concertante. In the luminous slow movement, which includes input from solo violin and cello and telling use of pizzicato from the section strings, Haydn divides his horns into two pairs.

The sinfonia concertante flavor is especially apparent in the finale, a set of variations in which solo oboe, cello, flute, violin, and double bass all get their moments, along with the horns. The movement concludes with a rollicking Presto and a final recollection of the horn-call that had ended the first movement, cementing the piece together into a delightful whole.

INTERMISSION

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83 (1878-81)

(50 minutes)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83
     Allegro non troppo
     Allegro appassionato
     Andante
     Allegro grazioso

Johannes Brahms began writing his Piano Concerto No. 2 during a vacation he took in the spring and summer of 1878 to Italy, a country from which he repeatedly drew inspiration. He was mostly working on his Violin Concerto just then, but while he was away, he also found time to sketch a scherzo, which he returned to three years later when he devoted himself in earnest to the Second Piano Concerto. Where his First Piano Concerto was hyper-charged in its drama, the Second is considerably more Apollonian; it suggests a more serene, warmhearted—and in its finale, downright charming— landscape, drawing heavily on the dulcet tones of the supreme Romantic instrument, the horn. Where the earlier work had stressed the turmoil of human passions and the “tragic sentiment of life” that the Romantics found irresistible, the Second Piano Concerto regards the breadth of human emotions from a more knowing remove. It sounds like a work of ripe maturity in a way the earlier piece does not.

This is not a “tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo,” as Brahms, ever given to irony, reported in a letter to his friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg—and to some extent that “wisp of a scherzo” recalls the turbulent character of the First Piano Concerto. Instead, it is an immense four-movement work of daunting difficulty, offering pianists both technical and conceptual challenges. One might go so far as to view Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 as a sort of symphony for piano and orchestra—a conflation of two of the principal genres that Brahms felt still held plenty of creative opportunities for an up-to-date Romantic composer who was moving through the 19th century.

Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

530 S Frontage Rd E Vail, CO 81657 Venue information