Concert Artist’s sleevenote
writer William Hedley notes that many
of these piano pieces resemble poems.
It was actually Hanslick who suggested
that they were monologues – and the
complex intimacies the word evokes is
certainly apt in this set, the fifth
volume in Joyce Hatto’s traversal of
Brahms’ piano music.
These are late works
and Hatto is at one with them. The first
of the Op.116 Fantasien is a Capriccio
marked Presto energico and that’s
how we get it, an intensely driving
opening to the set of seven, originally
published in two books. The Intermezzo
that follows has a veiled melancholy
and the G minor Capriccio (Allegro Passionata)
receives a bold, forthright reading
here, with fine leonine phrasing in
the central section. She is poetic without
losing the spine of the argument in
the E major intermezzo and characterises
with authority and individuality. Her
E minor Intermezzo couldn’t be more
removed from, say, Kempff’s in implication.
It’s marked Andante con grazia ed
intimissimo sentimento and Hatto
gets an array of tone colours at a reasonable
clip, whereas Kempff habitually took
it at a far more leisurely tempo. Where
I find someone like Kempff so impressive
is in the songfulness and explicit lyricism
in these pieces – and Joyce Hatto only
elides these aspects in the E major
Intermezzo, even though her concluding
Capriccio is once again splendidly bold.
Her Op.117 Intermezzi
are nobly conceived and full once more
of the subtlest range of colour, not
least the E flat. She finds bleak nobility
in the B flat minor at a more sedate
tempo, where Kempff is more mobile and
quicker but these are powerful readings.
The Klavierstücke Op.118 throws
up equally probing musicianship. Kempff
may be more urgent than Hatto in the
A major Intermezzo – it’s not often
that Joyce Hatto is bested in this way
– but he is less romantic. She tends
to drive through contrastive material
– take the Ballade in G minor for instance
where Kempff’s big contrasts fuse with
playful hauteur. Hatto has none of this,
and takes the Allegro energico
marking at face value – and gives it
to us, not without expression either,
always a feat at speed. I particularly
liked her walnut tone in the Romanze
in F major and those fast moving trills
in the central section. Her technical
prowess is remarkably consistent throughout
the disc. We end with the four pieces
that make up Op.119. She catches the
hesitancies of the Intermezzo in B minor
and the waltz theme embedded in the
E minor emerges with great acumen.
There are moments when
I felt that the acoustic was just a
touch echo-y – try the Rhapsodie in
E flat major from the Op.119 set which
doesn’t register with quite the vigour
that I think it would have otherwise.
Nevertheless this is an impressively
argued set of an exceptionally taxing
repertoire – taxing both technically
and emotively and Hatto meets these
demands without either digital limitation
or expressive abstemiousness.
Jonathan Woolf
Joyce Hatto (piano) 
