Orion Weiss | Arc II: Ravel, Brahms, Shostakovich
An Album that Strives to Understand the Ways Composers Comprehend Grief, through Performances of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Schumann and Chorale Preludes Nos. 10 & 11, and Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata No. 2
Watch the Album Trailer for Arc II
Acclaimed pianist Orion Weiss released his newest album, Arc II: Ravel, Brahms, Shostakovich in November 2022 on First Hand Records. Featuring performances of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Schumann and Chorale Preludes Nos. 10 & 11, and Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata No. 2, Arc II is the second album of a three-part series and strives to understand the varying ways composers comprehend grief, loss, and death. In this combination of works, Weiss follows the paths these composers walked in their own grief as their tracks lead us from death back towards life, from horror to hope.
The first release of Orion Weiss’s Arc trilogy – Arc I: Granados, Janáček, Scriabin – was released in March 2022 on First Hand Records and features important works for solo piano from the frantic years of 1911-1913 – the precipice before World War I. The three musical stories on Arc I, described by The Guardian as “complex and poetic material,” are Granados’ Goyescas, Janáček’s In the Mists, and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9 ”Black Mass,” each struggling with the same impossible awareness of what was coming for the world. The series closes with Arc III: Schubert, Debussy, Brahms, Dohnányi, and Talma – works composed during times of joy – forthcoming on First Hand Records.
“As we grieve what was lost, music born of suffering can bring us courage and succor,” says Orion Weiss. “As we envisage our ascent, music from times of joyful creation can create a road map leading us out and up. The final album in the trilogy, Arc III, is filled with young composers, post-war music, and music of celebration. It is my message of faith in humans – our resilience, our rebound, our irrepressibility.”
The first work on Arc II is Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-1917). Le Tombeau de Couperin is built out of loops and is unlike anything else in Ravel’s piano oeuvre. Weiss writes in the liner notes, “The momentum of these pieces isn’t that of machines or modernity. Rather, these are the dances and spinning-wheels of the lost past. They grasp at the bygone refinement and grace longed for in the new century. In addition to all that Ravel experienced during the first World War – the terror of the battles of Verdun, the death of so many friends, his own debilitating illness – he lost his beloved mother, ‘his only reason for living’. The music he synthesized out of all that grief is music of resonant contradiction: new and ancient, exotic and formal, joyful and haunting, meticulous yet filled with life. When asked why these musical tombs (for Couperin and for the friends he lost in the war) weren’t explicitly elegiac, Ravel responded: ‘The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.’ This cathartic music would be the last that he wrote for solo piano.”
Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9 (1854) presents a radiant portrait of Brahms’ inner life. Weiss explains, “Just 20 years old, he was introduced to (and all but adopted by) the Schumann family four short months before Robert’s attempted suicide and institutionalisation... Turning the theme and turning it again, each of the 16 variations refracts a single facet of his world through the prism of sudden loss. The variations move one to the other with the tumbling logic of emotion: shocked stillness follows tumultuous anger, consolation follows mourning, and the sweetness of happy reminiscence echoes off into searching oblivion... Of the Variations, Clara Schumann said, ‘He sought to comfort me, he composed variations on that wonderfully heartfelt theme that means so much to me, just as last year when I composed variations for my beloved Robert.’”
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor, Op. 61 (1943) was dedicated to his piano teacher and friend, Leonid Nikolayev, who perished that year in the mass evacuation from Leningrad. Shostakovich had miraculously survived ‘The Great Terror,’ Stalin’s 1930's attack on the Russian people, though imprisonments and killings in that purge had claimed the lives of many of his friends and family members. Weiss describes, “The music of the Piano Sonata is emotional, romantic, wild, and raw.”
The final work of the album is Johannes Brahms’s 11 Chorale Preludes, Op. 122 (1896). “More than 40 years after Op. 9, Brahms was at the end of his life. Sick, weak, worried for the future of music, and bereft of his life-long friend Clara, his music took on increasingly religious themes. These organ settings of centuries-old Lutheran hymns (transcribed for piano by his longtime admirer Ferrucio Busoni) tighten the thread between himself and Bach, between himself and his faith. Brahms’ compositional epilogue dates from immediately after Clara’s funeral; the Chorale Preludes, grieving yet heartbreakingly accepting and courageous, were the last notes he ever wrote. ‘Now I have nobody left to lose.’ (Johannes Brahms, after the death of Clara Schumann),” shares Weiss.
Of his Arc album series, Weiss explains, “The arc of this recital trilogy is inverted, like a rainbow’s reflection in water. Arc I’s first steps head downhill, beginning from hope and proceeding to despair. The bottom of the journey, Arc II, is Earth’s center, grief, loss, the lowest we can reach. The return trip, Arc III, is one of excitement and renewal, filled with the joy of rebirth and anticipation of a better future.”