Approved Alternates

Back in the nineteenth century, before the invention of recording, people who wanted to hear music had to make a lot of it for themselves.  Any home that could afford one had a piano, and some families went further by buying string and wind instruments.  Well-to-do people often played one or more instruments as a hobby, or perhaps avocation would be a better word.

To meet the demand, music publishers printed and sold numerous arrangements of classical orchestral works set down for piano duo (or 4 hands at 1 piano, the most common kind of arrangement), for string quartet, for flute or clarinet with piano -- the possible combinations were almost endless.  Some of the most popular pieces made it into a dozen or more different forms of arrangement.

In the midst of all this activity, there were composers -- here and there -- who arranged their own works for 4-hands or 2 pianos, and published these as authorised alternative versions of the better-known full score works.  In this post, I want to discuss three such authorised alternatives.

Johannes Brahms was primarily a pianist and preeminently a composer for the piano.  It's not surprising that he often turned to that instrument as a vehicle for his ideas.  One of his early masterpieces began life as a string quintet.  He then recast it in 1863 as a sonata for 2 pianos, lasting 3/4 of an hour!  From that stage, he finally moved on to the form in which it is best known today, the Piano Quintet Op. 34 for string quartet and piano.  But wait!  He also published the 2-piano version under Op. 34b!  Thus, the intermediate stage was clearly approved by the composer as worthy of circulation in its own right.

Ten years later, Brahms produced co-equal versions at the same time of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn:  the orchestral version as Op. 56a and the 2-piano version as Op. 56b.  Again, there is no doubt that the composer regarded both versions as having equal validity.

In both works, the character of the music is significantly altered when translated to the percussive sound of the pianos, but the musical ideas shine through with equal effectiveness.  Indeed, in the Variations especially, there is a fair bit of detail which sometimes gets submerged in an orchestral performance but has a much better chance of shining clearly through when played on 2 pianos.

Fast forward to 1940.  The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, then living in the USA, produced his last and (in some ways) most complex work, the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45.  This score, which bristles with stabbing cross-rhythms and hammered percussion sounds, is much more obviously apt to the piano medium than the two Brahms works I discussed above.  No surprise, then, that Rachmaninoff -- himself a foremost piano virtuoso of his day -- simultaneously composed a version for 2 pianos.  While this was never actually published in his lifetime, he gave it his imprimatur by himself giving the first performance alongside Vladimir Horowitz.  It has been recorded a number of times since then.

In each of these three cases, the 2-piano version exists very much in the shade of the orchestral parallel versions.  This is scandalous!  These three works each present significant challenges to the virtuoso pianist, and in addition there is the significant challenge of keeping the two pianists firmly in sync with each other.  In each case, too, I feel that the 2-piano version enormously illuminates and clarifies the orchestral text, and certainly ought to be heard by anyone who enjoys these particular works.

In the 1990s, the legendary pianist Martha Argerich teamed up with Russian pianist-composer Alexandre Rabinovitch, to record all three of the works mentioned here, as well as some Brahms waltzes and the two Rachmaninoff Suites for 2 pianos.  Many people have expressed preference for this or that other version of this or that piece, but for me these two collections are special because of the fire that invades all of the music -- unwavering Apollonian lamps in Brahms and flaring Dionysian torchlight in Rachmaninoff.  Playing and recording alike are exemplary.  If you can find these 2 Teldec CDs, don't hesitate to buy them!