Yannick Nézet-Séguin

November 15, 2018 at PST

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466; Piano Sonatas, K. 281 & 332

Seong-Jin Cho, who won the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2015, has previously seduced us with his Chopin and woven magic in Debussy. Here he reveals his mettle in Mozart. Joined by the ever-stylish Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the pianist gives us the D-minor Piano Concerto in a performance thrillingly alive to its drama and vividly contrasted light and shade. Melodies sing out, but he plumbs the depths too. Two sonatas, well chosen for their variety, complete an album that confirms this young pianist’s already considerable stature.

10 Tracks

November 16, 2023 at PST

Maestro: Music by Leonard Bernstein (Original Soundtrack)

With 2023’s Maestro, we at last have a mainstream movie that celebrates the unparalleled musical achievements of the conductor, composer, educator, and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein. Starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, Maestro tells the story of a man who juggles his ambitions with personal struggles that tear apart his relationships. And with the help of the Philadephia Orchestra’s conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Cooper goes all out to portray Bernstein’s musical genius, both on and off stage. “For us classical musicians,” says Nézet-Séguin, “to have someone so important in our world represented with such care, beauty, emotion, and authenticity on the big screen by Hollywood is a gift.”

Woven throughout Maestro is an impressive cross-section of Bernstein’s life in music, from his own works to the great symphonies for which he became renowned for conducting. There are little spoken vignettes from the film itself, too, adding something of a personal flavor.

The performances themselves incorporate instances of Bernstein’s own conducting, including part of his heartbreaking account with the Vienna Philharmonic of Mahler’s “Adagietto,” and an extract from his own Symphony No. 2, “Age of Anxiety,” with the New York Phil. Most of the movements and extracts, however, from Mass to Trouble in Tahiti and the “Prologue” to West Side Story, are presented in new performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nézet-Séguin.

“I discovered Bernstein’s recordings when I was a conducting student, and became fascinated by him,” Nézet-Séguin tells Apple Music Classical. “And I immediately felt very much under his inspiration and influence.” Soon after becoming music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012, the Canadian conductor made it his mission to perform Bernstein’s theatrical oratorio, Mass. “As ever in my life and career, I start with the biggest thing when I want to know a composer,” he laughs. “It was maybe one of the biggest shocks of my life. It taught me so much about Bernstein, and I think I could identify with the blending of genres in this piece. From that moment I became completely obsessed with Bernstein and decided to go through all his symphonies: ‘Jeremiah’, ‘Kaddish,’ and ‘The Age of Anxiety.’”

In addition to his role as conductor, Nézet-Séguin acted as advisor to Bradley Cooper, helping him in his pursuit of musical authenticity. The soundtrack features two instances of Cooper conducting as Bernstein: part of the finale from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” and, in a rehearsal scene, “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide. “The important thing was to help Bradley and guide him to really understand what made Bernstein special on the podium as opposed to other conductors,” says Nézet-Séguin. “We were solely oriented towards having every gesture in the style of Bernstein.

“There were countless videos of Bernstein that Bradley could observe and learn from,” he adds, “and I would do other videos with voiceover commentary on them, explaining the beats, explaining why he turns left or right here… and we would break it down together. Our sessions would be very much about discussing the gestures for any particular moment.”

With so much to pack in to such little time, did Cooper succeed in coaxing the grand, vibrant “Bernstein sound” from the LSO? The answer is not that simple. “It was not important to get a Yannick interpretation or a Bradley one,” explains Nézet-Séguin, “but Yannick and Bradley together getting a certain sound.” Cooper wore an earpiece while conducting, allowing Nézet-Séguin to speak to him and guide him in real time. “It’s hard to explain how collaborative this has been but, as you can imagine, it’s been a fascinating and very emotional journey for all of us.”

Nézet-Séguin is in no doubt of the impact that participating in Maestro has had on him. “It’s very hard to understand how only one person was capable of being at ease on Broadway, at ease in film music, at ease in religious music, in Hebrew, in English, in Latin, as a symphonic composer. But actually, this is all reflected in his life and in the fact that he was a true lover of many things, as he says in the movie, but also a bisexual, married to a woman that he loved but also interested in men all his life—and perhaps feeling forever wanting for more.”

However, for Nézet-Séguin, the film is much more than an ambitious biopic of a great man. It serves to show how classical music can, in the right circumstances, reach untapped audiences. “I do hope that through this film and this soundtrack that people are going to get more curious, not only about Bernstein, but about the whole of classical music.”

21 Tracks

October 10, 2019 at PDT

Destination Rachmaninov: Arrival

The second installment in Daniil Trifonov’s Rachmaninov piano concerto series is even finer than the splendid first. The Third Concerto is played with terrific virtuosity and fire, full of surging passion but also with loads of personality. The less-often-encountered First is also beautifully done, Trifonov clearly drawn to its not-so-obvious charms. Under the hugely musical Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the fabulous Philadelphia Orchestra—the Rachmaninov ensemble par excellence—add their mastery to this music-making. Trifonov’s own solo piano contributions are superb, especially his gorgeous and sparkling vision of the silver bells from Rachmaninov’s cantata The Bells. A really impressive achievement.

8 Tracks

September 23, 2021 at PDT

Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3

Florence Price was the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra: her Symphony No. 1, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1933. Nearly 90 years later, the great Philadelphia Orchestra—another major US ensemble—again puts her music center stage. And what lovely music it is, deftly scored with an open-eyed innocence and a folksy gait. The Philadelphia’s winds and strings sound quite gorgeous. Symphony No. 3 (1938-40) shows Price’s growth as a composer and her burgeoning confidence as an orchestrator. Here, the brass play a larger role, which hints at Wagner’s influence. It’s hard to imagine better performances, or a more ravishing sound quality.

8 Tracks

January 28, 2021 at PST

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1 & Symphonic Dances

Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 has been unfairly dogged since its disastrous, badly rehearsed first performance in 1897, after which the 24-year-old composer withdrew the work entirely. Recent recordings, however—including this terrific live performance—have proven it to be an early masterpiece. Canadian conductor and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra feel at home in this music, the symphony’s vivid first movement a journey of dramatic twists and turns, while its second-movement Scherzo is nervous and obsessive—a finale that blazes in full kaleidoscopic glory. This recording also houses Rachmaninoff’s last major work, the Symphonic Dances. Harmonically rich and orchestrally sumptuous, the dances are full of yearning. Nézet-Séguin brings exquisite detail to them, highlighting the dazzling, waltzing swirl of the second and the muscular heft of the cinematic third, the ancient “Dies Irae” chant driving it to its fateful, thrilling close.

7 Tracks

May 18, 2023 at PDT

Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1; Florence Price: Violin Concertos

Randall Goosby is classical music’s future. The eloquent violinist is also a torchbearer for the artform’s past, aware of its traditions without being ruled by them. His charismatic artistry and heartfelt lyricism are ideally matched to the choice of repertoire for his second album, a revelatory coupling of Max Bruch’s evergreen Violin Concerto No. 1 with the two violin concertos by Florence Price. The latter, completed respectively in 1939 and the year before the African American composer’s death in 1953, vanished from view until their rediscovery in 2009 in a pile of long-neglected manuscripts. Goosby appends both Price concertos with an arrangement for violin and orchestra of her tender Adoration.

“It’s a bit of a mission for me to try to broaden the outlook and scope of classical music,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “I was always inspired by music like Bruch’s Violin Concerto, Beethoven’s great string quartets and all these wonderful things. But I think putting such pieces side by side with music from another background creates a different listening experience. That was the idea behind pairing the Price concertos with the Bruch.”

The violinist identifies a “through line” connecting Roots, his 2021 debut album, to his recording of Bruch and Price. The slow movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto, he notes, shares common expressive ground with that of Price’s First Violin Concerto and of her Fantasie No. 2, one of the standout pieces from Roots. Both composers used chromatic harmonies to evoke strong emotions and heighten tension in their work. “People want to feel something when they listen to music. Bruch and Price understood that and gave listeners and performers plenty to feel in their violin concertos.”

Goosby’s passionate advocacy of all three concertos is backed to the hilt by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its chief conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose earlier recording of Price’s First and Third Symphonies helped secure new admirers for her work. “It was clear to me just how seriously they take this music, how excited they are about it and how much they’ve had time to sit and be with it,” he recalls. “They’re familiar with her musical language in a way that allowed us to really put our own stamp on it.”

Anyone eager to detect the strands of musical influence that Florence Price picked up from white European men, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky among them, will not be disappointed. Yet her music speaks above all with her own unique language. “I think those echoes of various late-Romantic composers are a mark of her respect, her admiration, for their work,” concludes Goosby. “But she really has such a distinctive artistic voice. There’s such a soulfulness to her music. You don’t find that everywhere. And her late-Romantic, fast-moving, very complex harmonies and acrobatics for the violin really amplify the lyrical passages in both concertos. I don’t know if that’s what she was going for, but I think it creates a really jarring effect in the best way for both the players and the audience.”

8 Tracks

July 14, 2022 at PDT

Beethoven: The Symphonies

“There’s no such thing as routine in music. Routine is the enemy,” conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin tells Apple Music about the attitude underlying his new recording of all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Nézet-Séguin’s in-the-moment approach to Beethoven is, he says, particularly suited to the COE’s detailed, highly focused way of working. Plus, he argues, Beethoven is a composer who demands an absolute, bar-by-bar commitment to the physical act of making music. “As we go further and further from Beethoven’s time, we tend to forget that he was someone who really wanted to shock people,” says Nézet-Séguin. “He wanted to shake every convention. It’s disturbing music, it’s sometimes unbalanced, it’s rough.” The rawness and originality of Beethoven’s inspiration is strongly reflected in the way Nézet-Séguin and the COE play his music. The finale of the Fourth Symphony sizzles with restless energy, while the famous opening of the Fifth has a lean, no-nonsense immediacy. Recording the symphonies live in concert (at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Germany, in July 2021) also helped give the extra edge Nézet-Séguin was looking for.

In making this recording of Beethoven’s great cycle, Nézet-Séguin was acutely aware of conductors who have come before him—among them Herbert von Karajan, Carlo Maria Giulini, and Leonard Bernstein—who put their own particular imprint on the music. But he has no doubt about who has influenced him most in Beethoven. “The set of the symphonies recorded in 1991 by Nikolaus Harnoncourt—also with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe—is, for me, the most important of the past 50 years,” he says. “It really opened people’s minds into how this music should be played.” And when Nézet-Séguin began conducting Beethoven with the COE two decades later, it was the players themselves who had the idea of revisiting what Harnoncourt had done and updating it for a new century. “Harnoncourt was a genius, and I liked very much the idea of paying tribute to that history and seeing how performance practice has evolved in the meantime.”

One thing Nézet-Séguin specifically wanted to do in his new cycle was recalibrate the sound of Beethoven’s orchestra, achieving a more even balance between the string section and the other instruments. “What is very important and maybe overlooked still is how the woodwinds—flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons—are at the heart of these symphonies,” he explains. Beethoven’s skirling woodwind writing comes through particularly clearly in Nézet-Séguin’s storming account of the choral finale to the Ninth Symphony, where the singers of the vocal group Accentus also make a stirring contribution. “There’s a real immediacy about their singing, which is one of the things I look for when I make music,” he adds.

When performing Beethoven’s symphonies in concert, Nézet-Séguin avoids programming them chronologically, preferring to pair up works that compare interestingly with one another. He recommends a similar approach to those listening to his new cycle. “The most important thing in Beethoven is clash and contrast,” he explains. “If I were to pick two symphonies to start with, it would be Nos. 2 and 3. No. 2 is still very classical, like someone who’s trying to wear all the right outfits, but underneath is ready to rip it off and show all the tattoos or something! And then the Third Symphony (the ‘Eroica’) is of gigantic proportions. It breaks the mold even from the first two chords.” The Sixth and Seventh symphonies also make for sharp comparisons, Nézet-Séguin explains. “The Sixth is really tender and shows a contemplative side of Beethoven that he explored much more in works other than symphonies. The Seventh starts where the Sixth has left it, but then catches fire and ends in something like a frenzy.”

Whichever way Beethoven’s symphonies are sequenced, Nézet-Séguin believes that, overall, they paint a moving portrait of how a great composer’s work developed. “It’s not necessarily a journey from one to nine, but more a vision which is there even from the beginning of the First Symphony. And as interpreters in the 21st century, we need to get back to the true spirit of Beethoven’s music, which is this element of surprise, of shock, of discovery.”

44 Tracks

July 29, 2021 at PDT

Mahler: Symphony No. 4

4 Tracks

August 27, 2015 at PDT

Rachmaninov: Variations

73 Tracks

December 31, 2012 at PST

Mozart: Così fan tutte, K. 588

Mozart’s comic drama of mistaken identity, mistrust, and rekindled love finds a new champion in this sparkling recording from 2012. For one thing, the vocal dexterity on display is a delight: mezzo Angela Brower and soprano Miah Persson are magnificently mischievous in their duet “Prenderò quel brunettino.” And has there ever been a more heartfelt performance of Mozart’s masterful trio “Soave sia il vento” with its undulating, sensuous strings? Rolando Villazón's tenor voice is sweet as honey, his tender tribute to his wife’s fidelity, “Un’aura amorosa,” full of vocal contrast. The orchestra, meanwhile, are sharp as tacks—their ensemble is nearly perfect, as is their sensitivity to these wonderful singers.

64 Tracks

December 31, 2013 at PST

Aranjuez

Montenegrin superstar guitarist Miloš Karadaglić’s recording of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez stands as one of the great interpretations of this cornerstone of the guitar repertoire. But his other choices for this album—lesser-known music by Rodrigo and his great older contemporary Manuel de Falla—show him to be not just a fine musician, but also something of a musical explorer. Falla’s tender tribute to Debussy (“Homenaje pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy”), written shortly after the Frenchman’s death, contrasts with a flash of color from his famous ballet El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat). To finish, Miloš shines a light on Rodrigo’s other great guitar concerto—the lush, neoclassical Fantasía para un Gentilhombre (Fantasia for a Gentleman), written in 1954 for the legendary Andrés Segovia.

13 Tracks

February 2, 2023 at PST

Clara & Robert Schumann: Piano Concertos

Husband-and-wife composers Clara and Robert Schumann may have been united in love, but it has taken some time for their music to be programmed together. For more than a century after her death in 1896, concert pianist, composer, and mother to their children Clara was considered a footnote to Robert’s life. Today, however, the balance is being redressed, with Beatrice Rana’s new recording playing a major part in the revival of her First Piano Concerto.

“I am now so much into Clara’s Concerto, but I was a bit skeptical for a few years,” admits the Italian pianist. “I knew about her being Robert’s muse and being a great concert pianist; otherwise, I knew nothing. Then, when I was asked to perform it and began to study the score, I realized it was very beautiful and quite revolutionary.” And, she discovered, not recorded by any of the piano greats. “I realized there was so much to do.”

Clara composed her Concerto while still a teenager. It grew out of a single-movement work and was premiered by her in a concert conducted by fellow composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1835. Paired on this album with her future husband’s more familiar Concerto, also in A minor, it sounds fresh and instinctive. On first hearing, the young Clara’s musical impetuosity can seem showy and superficial, but with Rana seeking out the work’s depths and with Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s supportive direction, the quality of her ideas is soon revealed and quickly takes root. As Rana explains, “There is this idea of Clara’s Concerto being something polite or pleasant. This is really not the case. It’s an intense work, full of contrasts.”

This is also true of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the album’s second work and, like Clara’s, originally a one-movement composition. Premiered in 1845, when Schumann was 35, it’s clearly the work of a mature composer but one who was not above referencing his young wife’s Concerto. Examples include the four-note motif he borrowed from her for the first-movement coda and his use of a slow episode in A-flat to bridge two sections of the same movement. Most striking, though, is the dialogue between cellos and soloist in the second movement, a reminder of Clara’s intimate piano and cello duet in hers, and the way this same movement leads into the finale without interruption.

There, however, the similarities end. Robert’s Concerto is a good 10 minutes longer and is considerably more challenging for the pianist, especially in the interaction with the orchestra. “No other piano concerto demands such an intense rapport,” says Rana. “It’s why I was particularly happy to do this recording with Yannick because he’s a musician I feel very close to. For example, I’ve struggled to find conductors who can understand and interpret my ideas about the third movement, one often regarded as just being joyful and happy but which I believe has so much poetry. Fortunately, Yannick can. To have someone who can overcome all of its difficulties so that we can focus on the music was inspirational.”

Rana’s ideas about Robert and Clara coalesce in her choice of final work, Liszt’s arrangement of Robert Schumann’s song “Widmung” (“Dedication”). “Knowing the poem that Schumann set his original version to, playing this piece at the end of the recording made so much sense to me,” says Rana. “Rückert’s text expresses everything about Robert and Clara’s relationship, telling of a love so incredible that it brings out in each of them ‘mein bess’res Ich’—my better self.”

7 Tracks

October 3, 2024 at PDT

My American Story: North

Russian-born and now US-resident Daniil Trifonov pays tribute to his adopted homeland in this first instalment of My American Story. This is very much a portrait of modern America, the earliest work included here being George Gershwin’s 1925 Piano Concerto.

This is given a wonderfully characterful and endearing performance by Trifonov and his excellent partners, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The Philadelphians play with splendid pizazz, as one might expect, in the lively first and final movements. But the slow central “Adagio” is the real winner, with the languid principal trumpet a perfect foil to the perkiness of Trifonov’s playing.

Mason Bates’ concerto, written specifically for Trifonov, is heard here in its premiere performance recorded live in January 2022. As well as reaching outside the US with playful references to the musical mannerisms of Renaissance Europe, it also presents an attractive glitter in the piano writing and orchestral sheen from the world of film music.

Trifonov extends his tribute to the movies with an extract from American Beauty and the energetically jazzy “Memphis Stomp” from The Firm. And there’s more jazz in the form of arrangements by Art Tatum—Trifonov capturing the charming nonchalance of that phenomenal pianist—and Bill Evans.

He also shows a more serious, European-orientated side of American music. In Copland’s modernistic Piano Variations of 1930, Trifonov discovers a feisty and recognizably American spirit in its apparently unyielding flintiness. He also gives a thoughtful performance of John Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato, drawing out its melancholy before convincingly unveiling its inspiration from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Inside the Album Booklet
An extensive note on Trifonov’s program includes several quotes from the pianist giving his personal views of the music. Plus there are several color photos of Trifonov at the Cleveland Institute of Music where he studied for five years, and in typical or distinctive North American settings.

Album booklets are available in version 2.0 of Apple Music Classical, which you can download now and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.

14 Tracks

June 29, 2023 at PDT

Rachmaninoff: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3; Isle of the Dead

No ensemble has greater pedigree in the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff than the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom the composer made a series of landmark recordings in the pre-LP era. The Philadelphia’s Rachmaninoff tradition continues in this superbly played double album of orchestral music led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s current music director.

While respecting the fabled lushness of the Philadelphia sound, Nézet-Séguin’s approach to the Second and Third Symphonies focuses on a tingling transparency of texture. In both slow movements he carefully avoids over-romanticizing the music, while phrasing with considerable warmth and flexibility. The tone poem Isle of the Dead is appropriately dark-hued and brooding, without overburdening the piece with morbidity. All told, these are wonderfully direct and refreshing performances.

10 Tracks

August 1, 2019 at PDT

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte

Mozart’s final opera, premiered in 1791, the year of his death, is also arguably his greatest work. Part love story, part comedy—and entirely puzzling—Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is full of in-jokes and barefaced mischief alongside some of music’s most rapturous moments. So it requires musicians who can tread this delicate balance between absurdity and serious art. And that’s what we have here, including Albina Shagimuratova, whose Queen of the Night outshines her rivals with her invective and musical precision. Rolando Villazón’s Papageno is full of quirky charm and, in Klaus Florian Vogt, the love-struck Tamino has a tenor voice to die for. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Yannick Nézet-Séguin somehow blend intimacy and grandeur for, yes, a magical recording.

56 Tracks

December 31, 2011 at PST

Mozart: Don Giovanni, K. 527

53 Tracks

November 1, 2009 at PST

Ravel: La Valse, Mother Goose & Daphnis Et Chloé Suite No. 2

17 Tracks

November 11, 2021 at PST

Before the Deluge (Arr. Caroline Shaw) - Single

1 Trackfalse

June 30, 2016 at PDT

Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492

Strongly cast, Nézet-Séguin’s Figaro makes a powerful impression. Underpinned by a Chamber Orchestra of Europe revelling in the work’s rich drama, the characters come alive with striking immediacy. Thomas Hampson and Sonya Yoncheva make a fine foil for their servants Luca Pisaroni and Christiane Karg, both offering nicely rounded portrayals and some really glorious singing. As Cherubino, Angela Brower lives the part. Luxuriously cast, Anne Sofie von Otter and Rolando Villazón make much of their small roles. This is a Marriage of Figaro rich in incident and nicely judged, and the recitatives with cello and fortepiano are a joy.

82 Tracks

June 15, 2017 at PDT

Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 1-5 (Live)

Joined by a Chamber Orchestra of Europe that’s swift of foot, light of spirit and virtuoso to the last player, Nézet-Séguin proves an ideal guide to Mendelssohn’s five symphonies. The First bounds along without a care, while the vocal Second is given the weight it needs—and the solo singing is first-rate. The Third (Scottish) has plenty of mystery and atmosphere, the charming Fourth (Italian) is bathed in Mediterranean sunlight, and the Fifth (Reformation) has gravitas and nobility. A set of the Mendelssohns for a new generation.

31 Tracks

February 1, 2018 at PST

Visions of Prokofiev

Lisa Batiashvili is a wonderful violinist, and this fine album of Prokofiev’s two concertos marks another milestone in a career that leaps from mountain peak to mountain peak. She characterizes each work with great insight and style, clearly attuned to the biographical background of this most complex of 20th-century composers. What’s also striking is the range of color and volume with which Batiashvili and Nézet-Séguin invest the music, unusually faithful to the score—the opening of the Second Concerto is done with great imagination and some stunning solo and orchestral playing. Three short Prokofiev pops are delightful extras.

9 Tracks

July 11, 2024 at PDT

Brahms: Symphonies

Yannick Nézet-Séguin was 12 when he fell in love with Brahms while singing in Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), he tells Apple Music Classical. He began exploring other works by Brahms, and discovered a composer who probed the deepest human emotions through exquisitely structured music that paid homage to the great German traditions of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

“Brahms’ music is the ideal representation of the balance between heart and mind,” says Nézet-Séguin, “and I feel now I’m getting experienced enough, and also maybe just maturing as an artist and as a person, to get closer to that balance.

“People are sometimes so in admiration of the beauty of the music’s form that it becomes a little cold and detached,” Nézet-Séguin adds, “but in my case, when I started to conduct Brahms symphonies 20 years ago, I think I was too far on the opposite end of the spectrum, maybe focusing too much on the expressive side of his writing.”

In his complete cycle of Brahms symphonies, recorded live in Baden-Baden with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Nézet-Séguin has decided to strike that balance by asking his musicians to imagine they were playing chamber music. “I thought it would be great to feel the same freedom playing the symphonies as when we’re playing in a quartet,” says Nézet-Séguin. The result is a set of performances that are lithe and clear, each player apparently alive to every tiny detail.

Although written for full orchestra, Brahms’ symphonies all date from late on his career when he was exploring a less-is-more approach. Rather than follow the example of his contemporaries Liszt, Wagner, or Berlioz, who were all expanding the possibilities of the orchestra and envisaging vast dramatic canvases, Brahms was able (and preferred) to express equally profound sentiments with smaller, more traditional forces and time-honored compositional structures. Classical restraint meets Romantic passion.

“Brahms is very, very classically orchestrated,” explains Nézet-Séguin. “Tuba only comes up in the Second Symphony, there’s a triangle only once in the Fourth, and that’s it. The trombones are used more often in the Second Symphony, but not very much in the Third. And in the Fourth, they come in just at the end, as in the First Symphony. Even the trumpet and timpani writing goes against what was being developed at the time by other composers.”

When it was premiered in 1876, Brahms’ First Symphony was hailed as “Beethoven’s 10th”. Nézet-Séguin recognizes the Beethoven connection, but in a different way. “Right now, I imagine Brahms’ First as another way of taking Beethoven’s path after the Fifth Symphony,” he suggests. “It’s almost as if Beethoven hadn’t written his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony and instead turned left or turned right.”

With Symphony No. 2, Nézet-Séguin highlights its emotional ambiguities. Yes, there is tremendous joy in the final “Allegro con spirito,” but the first movement is more complex. “There is sunshine but never pure sunshine; usually there are some clouds in between. It’s beautiful, like nature is. And it’s never just one color or one shade—it’s all the shades and colors at once.

Symphony No. 3, says Nézet-Séguin, is Brahms’ secret garden. “The opening is so grand and fantastically heroic in its 6/4 meter, but then very quickly you get the impression you’re entering the woods or a garden where you have to discover everything underneath the flowers, underneath the leaves—underneath what’s first seen and first heard.”

The Fourth, which starts intimately and grows increasingly impassioned, is a rare example of a minor-key symphony that also ends in the minor, rather than in a blaze of major-key glory, as was generally the convention in symphonies before and even after Brahms. “Audiences would have been expecting a happy ending,” says Nézet-Séguin, “but Brahms was not there for that!”

The brooding final movement of Symphony No. 4 is perhaps the most Brahmsian of them all. Structured as a Baroque passacaglia, it’s a set of 30 variations on a recurring bassline, and displays both the composer’s love of form and counterpoint, and his mastery of orchestration. Within 10 minutes, Brahms conjures an astonishing range of dynamics and moods.

“Brahms was maybe the most knowledgeable of all composers in terms of what came before him,” says Nézet-Séguin. “He knew Renaissance music, and was a collector of pieces by Rameau and Couperin. He knew everything by Bach, and he knew Bach’s place in history.”

No doubt the atmosphere of Baden-Baden added to the electricity of these compelling performances, says Nézet-Séguin. After all, Brahms loved the idyllic southwest German town so much that he had a house there, returning summer after summer between 1865 and 1874 to relax and seek inspiration for many of his greatest works. “I talked about this a lot with the musicians,” Nézet-Séguin remembers, “and everybody took walks, visited Brahms’ house, and breathed in Baden-Baden’s air. It was very special to be there, especially for that music.”

16 Tracks

August 18, 2022 at PDT

Secret Love Letters

Lisa Batiashvili embraces the theme of secret love on her aptly titled album Secret Love Letters. “The biggest secret I had as a child was connected to the deepest and strongest human emotion: love,” the Georgian violinist tells Apple Music. “In kindergarten, I fell in love with a four-year-old boy and my stomach ached and leapt when I looked at him. I feared telling anyone, even my mother, who I worried would dismiss the emotions I felt so strongly because I was so young.” Instead, she turned to her instrument as her private confidant, through which she expressed her innermost feelings.

But instead of immediately plunging the listener into this potentially turbulent world of suppressed longing, here Batiashvili eases us in with the Violin Sonata in A Major by César Franck. Written as a wedding present for the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, the sublime, four-movement work manages to be at once restrained and emotionally unfettered. Accompanying Batiashvili is Giorgi Gigashvili, who won a scholarship from the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation in 2021. Following the sonata is the Violin Concerto No. 1 by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. The highly charged work expresses, says Batiashvili, the composer’s secret feelings for another man. In it, Szymanowski—who sought technical advice on its composition from the violinist Paweł Kochański—lays bare his emotions, at times to an unbearable degree. As Batiashvili says, “It is a dance between eroticism and compassion, between a dream world and tough reality.”

There’s also Poème, another work for violin and orchestra, by Ernest Chausson, which chimes perfectly with Batiashvili’s pursuit of the inexpressible in “all of its nuances of love and beauty,” and Beau soir, a short but touching piece for violin and piano, the latter played by the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The four works satisfy Batiashvili’s theme of secret love, each in its own way dreamlike, reflective, anguished, and impassioned. Read on as she guides us through each of them in-depth.

Violin Sonata in A Major
“This is the first time I have played with Giorgi [Gigashvili], but I’ve known him now for two years because he’s one of my foundation’s first scholars. He is a diverse musician who doesn’t only play classical music; he can also sing pop and jazz. When a talent like this is so obvious and when the desire for music is so strong, I feel that this diversity has taught him to be incredibly spontaneous, so for me to play with him allowed me to look at the Sonata like an open book. This can happen when you meet a musician: You play a piece you know well, but suddenly it becomes a new piece. We were very much on the same wavelength.”

Violin Concerto No. 1
“I played this music for the first time in 2018, with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, and I fell in love with it. I had an incredible feeling when playing it. Its sensuality and extremely interesting colors and emotions were new to me. When I learned that Szymanowski dedicated the work to his friend Paweł Kochański, who wrote the cadenza, I realized there is so much passion and so much hidden love expressed here. The music is an explosion of emotions. For example, there are moments that the violin goes very high on the E string. It’s like a very sensual singing voice on a huge, orchestral carpet of sound. And then, elsewhere in the middle and also the end, is a habanera. It’s love and dancing, together! We must celebrate love, especially in these terrible times, and music is the language that can do this.”

Poème
“Although it’s not a virtuoso piece, Poème is tricky to play with an orchestra. It bursts with color and emotion, but soloist and orchestra must always be together. Like Szymanowski, Chausson had help from a violinist, Eugène Ysaÿe, when composing it. These violinists were super important for both composers. They helped them see what was musically possible and what sounded better. Personally speaking, I don’t believe you can write a piece for a soloist if you don’t consult a person who will give you expert insight into the instrument you are writing for. This is why, when you play a piece that was very obviously dedicated to or composed with a soloist in mind and who has contributed to it, it’s a completely different experience for the performer.”

Beau soir
“Beau soir is a very intimate piece and another facet of the album’s theme of unexplained and untold love. I had planned to record several Debussy pieces with Yannick, but we ended up doing just this one. Happily, it is a beautiful ‘song.’ Debussy is one of my favorite composers, who gives you incredible freedom of expression, although with very precise score indications. I’ve played and recorded with Yannick before. He is one of the greatest conductors of our time who, like, for example, Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim, hears everything while seeing the whole picture. He brings incredible insight to even the shortest piece of music.”

10 Tracks

June 3, 2021 at PDT

Introspection: Solo Piano Sessions

21 Tracks