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In Reply to: RE: Counter-intuitively, I think that the Scottish Fantasy is the better piece of music posted by John Marks on September 14, 2014 at 15:15:29
Nathan Milstein agreed with you about the Bruch G minor as a near miss. He was also lukewarm about the Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Glazunov and Prokofiev concertos, and downright disliked the Sibelius. Only the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos fully met his standards. (The Bach and Mozart concertos didn't count as concertos in his calculations, and he doesn't even mention Vivaldi, despite his superb recordings of many of these.)
Funny thing is, he was especially enthusiastic about the Berg concerto, and got permission to perform it in a violin and piano version from the violinist who commissioned it. Sad that he never recorded it.
Follow Ups:
Brahms could be a dickhead.
jm
I thought Brahms needed (and got) a lot of help on the violin part from Joachim. And of course he radically revised it, cutting it down from four movements to three.
Milstein thought of the Brahms as like the Beethoven concerto but not as good. Maybe some truth to that, but imo Brahms went beyond Beethoven in achieving a loose, almost improvised, East European gypsy feel to the violin line.
For me another great example of that, though it's a far lesser piece, is the Khachaturian violin concerto. Of course, as a Soviet bloc composer, he wouldn't have been considered by Milstein at all.
And there is lots of scholarship on this that I honestly have only skimmed, and IIRC a color reproduction of the manuscript so you can more easily see the changes, but, as I understand it, the scholarly consensus is that ironically enough, Brahms accepted Joachim's purely musical suggestions much more readily than he did Joachim's violinistic objections.
The primary violinistic objection as I understood it was that by writing piano-like chords for the violin, Brahms was making the violinist choose between playing the chords as written or playing in tune, owing to the deflection of the middle string in the chord because of the curvature of the violin's bridge.
There's a lot more sturm und drang crunchiness of sound in the Brahms concerto than the Mendelssohn, f'ristance.
Indeed, the Brahms Violin Concerto goes a lot more smoothly as a piano concerto!
jm
also was adviser to the Bruch's Concerto. Hence some similarity to Brahm's VC in its 3rd movement for Hungarian dance music.
All four of Brahms' concerti end with Gypsy dances or quasi-Gypsy quasi-dances.
jm
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