Concerto for two pianos in A flat minor, Op.88a

While he had a natural affinity with string instruments - the Violin Concerto in G minor is only the best known of several highly idiomatic works for violin or cello with orchestra - Bruch was not much interested in the piano. He wrote little keyboard music of any kind, certainly nothing as big as a concerto, and left to himself he would surely never have thought of undertaking a double piano concerto. In his youth, however, he had written a Fantasia for two pianos and it was a performance of that work by the American sisters Ottilie and Rose Sutro that persuaded him to agree to their request for a concerto to add to their piano-duo repertoire.

In war-time conditions in Berlin in 1915 Bruch was not inclined to create something new for the Sutro sisters. Whether they knew it or not, the Concerto in A flat minor which they first performed in Philadelphia in 1916, with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, was actually an arrangement of an unpublished Suite for organ and orchestra. And, whether Bruch knew it or not, the material they used on that occasion was not his but a rewrite by the sisters, who apparently played it only twice but continued to tinker with the score for the rest of their lives. It was only after their death - Ottilie survived until 1970, when she was not far short of her hundredth birthday - that Bruch’s own score came to light and could be restored to its original state.

The inspiration behind the organ Suite was a religious procession Bruch had observed from the window of the Hotel Royal in Capri on Good Friday 1904. He noted down what he described as “a kind of signal” played by “a messenger of sadness with a large tuba” and “a kind of lamentation” sung by “a few hundred children dressed in white and carrying large burning candles.” Obviously impressed by the experience, he incorporated the two themes he had noted down in an orchestral suite, choosing to make a feature of the organ presumably because of the solemn nature of the procession and its destination in a nearby church. The project turned out to be more difficult than he had thought, however, and the work he had started in 1904 was not completed to his satisfaction until 1915. The two-piano version - excluding the organ, of course - was put together in less than two months.

The work begins with the grim signal issued in Capri by the “messenger of sadness with a large tuba” solemnly proclaimed by the two pianos in unison. Solemnity prevails through the rest of the opening Andante sostenuto as the pianos initiate a fugue on the children’s lamentation and as the orchestra joins in a contrapuntal development towards a climax that combines the two themes. The briefly melodious Andante con moto, which follows without a break, acts as a transition to a very much cheerful Allegro molto vivace. The most brilliant and concerto-like movement of the four, it is based on two themes, a Mendelssohnian display of agility for the two pianos and a more lyrical idea introduced clarinet in dialogue with the second piano. They are both developed among much virtuoso figuration from the soloists and eventually recapitulated in different colours.

The heart of the work is in the Adagio ma non troppo which - not least because of the atmosphere it has in common with the Scène d’amour in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette - seems to be inspired by some nocturnal love scene rather than anything to do with the Capri experience. It has only one main theme, first heard on piano after a brief but poetic introduction on horn and woodwind, but it is a melody with the expressive potential to sustain two impassioned orchestral climaxes and, between them, a tenderly reflective middle section. Although the Andante introduction to the last movement takes us straight back to Capri on Good Friday with a stern reminder of the tuba signal on pianos and lower brass, the main Allegro section transforms that theme into a cause for celebration. Soloists and orchestra duly and wholeheartedly comply.