Hidden Affinities Music of Brahms, Schoenberg, Boulez, and Prokofiev
Thomas May
For his second solo recital at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Denis Kozhukhin has chosen three works that trace a clear-cut lineage from the 19th to the mid-20th century. Though he would soon come to repudiate Arnold Schoenberg, in his first published works, including his Piano Sonata No. 1, the young Pierre Boulez was especially attracted to such pre-twelve-tone works as the Chamber Symphony as models for new formal procedures—at a time when Schoenberg was indeed poorly understood. The Austrian modernist in turn had reclaimed Brahms as a misunderstood “progressive,” pointing specifically to the ingenious techniques exemplified by his late piano compositions as a source of inspiration for his own concept of “developing variation.” To conclude, Kozhukhin then turns to the most expansive of his com patriot Sergei Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, a work that in turn echoes aspects of the melancholy lyricism and introspection that had putatively been banished with the rejection of Romanticism. Brahms’s Maximal Miniatures The very first and very last items in the catalogue Brahms published over his lifetime were for the keyboard: the Op. 1 Piano Sonata and the Op. 122 Chorale Preludes for organ, respectively, with the collections of Opp. 116–119 13
