Hungarian Dances

And you have a wonderful colleague that you've worked with for many, many years, Cynthia Rehm, who will be playing with you the two piano pieces of Brahms.

You have the Hungarian dances, you have the five waltzes, and then the variations on a theme of Haydn for two pianos.

What a first half of the concert.

And Cynthia's coming in this afternoon, and you're coming together again.

Absolutely.

Cynthia and I have known each other since we were students, but we've been playing together professionally since 1996.

And in 1997, one of our first projects was to record for connoisseur society, all the Hungarian dances and waltzes of Brahms, which were originally written for piano duet.

That's two people at one piano.

And we sort of, in a way, snuck in an all-American program under the radar, if you wanna call it that, because all American music on the first half and of course the New World Symphony inspired by America on the second half.

The only piece that wasn't obviously American was the encore, our Brahms Hungarian Dance, but I'm sure we could find a two degrees of separation there if we really wanted to.

But it was-- I, I think it was very well received.

Augustin's playing is, of course, just, just carried the day, and it was incredible, just incredible to be, to be able to, to, to hear the enthusiasm that was associated with that.

I wanted to ask you, why didn't Brahms write anything for contrabassoon? You're, you're not in this e-encore that we're gonna hear in just a moment.

Not, not in the encore, but he wrote some wonderful parts in the symphonies and in the Deutsches Requiem and of course his Academic Festival Overture.

Some wonderful things he wrote for us, but not the Hungarian Dances.

[laughs]

And roundabout the same time, in Eastern Europe, a very wonderful composer called Béla Bartók was doing very much the same thing.

He was born in Hungary, and lots of composers had written things like Hungarian Rhapsodies and Hungarian Dances, composers like Liszt or Brahms.

And Bartók was thinking, "Well, yeah, this is all very well, but they don't sound Hungarian.

They don't actually sound like the folk music that I hear when I go out into the countryside and hear people actually playing it." So he also went out with his wax cylinders, and he recorded, I think, thousands of these folk tunes, and it had a major influence on his own music.

Now, of course, Julius Katchen fans are going to have their own special favorites.

And I myself could have put his recordings of the Brahms concertos on this list, or his wonderful Stoafi Brahms Hungarian dances.

or perhaps the second and the better of his two recordings of the Balakirif Islami.

But if you are new to Julius Katchen, check out the recordings I've been talking about.

[laughs] You also, you s- you were saying, uh, before the trombone is misunderstood in that it is associated...

And that little arrangement that we heard earlier of the Hungarian Dance by Brahms, speaking of Brahms, um, was, you know, pretty brash most of the time.

But I was listening to, uh, a video, I'm not sure it was you, it might have been somebody else, playing, uh, the Morello Trombone Concerto, Bass Trombone Concerto Number One.

Mm-hmm.