Bath Camerata is collaborating with the fantastic piano duo ‘Piano 4 Hands’ this season in a series of performances of Brahms’s A German Requiem (Ein deutsches Requiem).  Pianists Waka Hasegawa and Joseph Tong make up the Piano 4 Hands duo, and we recently asked Joe to share some of his memories and experiences, plus his thoughts on Brahms…

When did you and Waka first meet, and what were your early experiences?

“We first met when we were both students at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1995. I remember we had hardly spoken at this point and found ourselves competing against each other in a piano competition in Birmingham that summer. It was called the Brant International Competition and took place at the former Birmingham
Conservatoire. I was really impressed by Waka’s playing of one of the most difficult ‘early’ Beethoven sonatas, the E Flat Op 7. Waka got through to the final, and I was eliminated after the second round! But there was something very special about the overall musical experience of this competition. One of the judges was the legendary Kendall Taylor,
who, by then in his early nineties, overslept on the morning of the 2nd round. After a nervous wait, as I was due to be playing first, I remember having a memory slip in the first page of my Beethoven sonata!

Waka and I first performed together in January 1998. It’s funny to look back on it now, because instead of a more predictable choice of staples from the piano duet repertoire we decided to learn and premiere a very demanding new piece by the composer Noriko Motomatsu for the Park Lane Group, which we played to an assembled audience
of new music afficionados in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. The piece was called ‘Nowaki’ and was a full-on fifteen minutes of four-handed pyrotechnics as far as I remember, a real baptism of fire! My over-riding memory of the occasion was that after we’d played it, there were supposed to be questions from the audience or some kind of impromptu panel discussion. As this didn’t quite happen, perhaps the listeners were either too shy or completely startled by what they’d just heard, the host of the event asked us to perform the piece all over again! So we gave the first and second performances of ‘Nowaki’ within the space of half an hour. I still remember how tired my fingers (and brain!) felt afterwards.

Career highlights so far?

Some of the highlights of our concert career have been performing at Wigmore Hall in London, where we have given world premieres of newly commissioned works by Nicola LeFanu, Dai Fujikura, Edwin Roxburgh and the late John McCabe. It has also been really
amazing to perform at the Cheltenham Music Festival three times, where we were invited to play Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ to mark the ballet’s centenary year in 2013 as well as commissioning new works from David Matthews and Daniel Kidane in 2016. Other highlights have included performances in the wonderful acoustic of St George’s Bristol, where we’re really looking forward to returning with Bath Camerata next autumn, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and trips abroad to the USA and Japan. Ginza Oji Hall is one of the best chamber music venues in Tokyo, and it was also an honour to play in the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Series in Chicago, for a live broadcast from Preston Bradley Hall in 2006 and then at the National Gallery in London a decade later!

Any amusing tales to share? 

There are lots of anecdotes and unexpected, bizarre things that have happened to us over the years. Once we were performing on a cruise ship and found that we were in a group of cabaret entertainers stranded in Port Said, Egypt because the coach had driven off to Cairo without us. One of the on-board comedians hatched a plan and commandeered a local minibus to take us to the Egyptian capital from where we were due to fly back to London. All was going well until the minibus had a puncture and we were all left stranded on the side of a road, surrounded by desert in the middle of a January night. We somehow hitched another lift after a long roadside wait. No mobile phones back then! I think it was the comedian who kept everyone’s spirits up with continual gags and songs.

Our most famous mess-up was the occasion of the forgotten music. It was back in 2005, and Waka and I were due to play a piece by a distinguished composer in his presence, at a well-known British independent school. Yes, you’ve guessed it, both of us left it to each other and arrived at the venue after a long car journey to discover that, to our complete horror, we had forgotten to bring the music. It was already 5pm on a Friday and the music publisher’s office had closed for the weekend – also this was before iPads, smartphones and Pdf. files were readily available and accessible for such eventualities. We were completely stuck. The poor composer hadn’t brought a score either, and I will never forget his initial response ‘Well, I suppose you can more or less play it from memory?’. If only…

In a panic, we had to hastily rearrange the programme and insert solo contemporary pieces hurriedly re-learnt an hour before the concert. The composer concerned was the epitome of calm and grace throughout, and quickly forgave us it seems!”

Where has your inspiration for Brahms come from?

“By a funny co-incidence I spent the New Year in Baden-Baden, which turned out to be a kind of musical field trip as well as a relaxing end-of-year holiday. Brahms rented a house very close to Baden-Baden, in nearby Lichtenthal between 1865 – 1874, spending his summers in there and composing some of ‘Ein Deutsches Requiem’ as he revised and extended the work between 1865 and 1868.

Although, frustratingly for me, Brahms’s house was closed to visitors over the extended Christmas break, I had ample time to explore the town and consider what might have drawn Brahms to Baden-Baden. Clara Schumann had moved to the famous spa town just two years earlier. (Her house still exists too, in a beautiful location by the river, but has undergone alterations and is now divided into flats.)  The Clara factor aside, Baden-Baden has long been known as a place of healing and is surrounded by the breath-taking scenery of the Black Forest. It is possible as a 21st Century tourist to explore walks which Brahms and Clara Schumann enjoyed during those summers! In short, it was the ideal environment for artistic inspiration and quiet reflection, as Brahms tried to recover from the shock of his mother’s death in February 1865.

And what of Brahms’s A German Requiem and his piano duo transcription? 

The German Requiem is one of the composer’s greatest masterpieces and is also the longest composition Brahms ever wrote. It was a work of great personal significance, taking several years to complete and finally bringing the composer widespread international recognition. As well as being a Requiem in memory of his mother, the initial idea of writing a Requiem a few years earlier almost certainly occurred as a result of the tragic death of Robert Schumann in 1856. It is a monumental and powerfully uplifting work, which takes its text from the Lutheran Bible and focuses on the living, placing more emphasis on consoling those left behind. A great deal of the music is set in a major key, for example, with expressive lyricism pervading the work and with no setting of the ‘Dies Irae’ with its evocation of angry judgement. One fascinating detail concerning the work’s title is that Brahms once told the Director of Music at Bremen Cathedral that he could have happily called it ‘A Human Requiem’ (Ein menschliches Requiem). This observation, which Brahms also repeated in a letter to Clara Schumann, also seems in keeping the work’s recurring theme of a transition from mourning to comfort and consolation.

What makes the piano version different from the original orchestral version? The entire experience will be pared down, leaner, more intimate and closer to what we might think of as a domestic performance. Despite the lack of instrumentation, there will (hopefully!) be no sense of a monochrome piano sonority. Four hands have the advantage of being able to use all the potential keyboard textures to greater effect than would be possible by a single pianist, and one of the jobs of a pianist in any case is to suggest different families of instruments through warmth of tone, differences in touch, varied articulation, thickness of chordal (orchestral) textures, judicious use of pedal and so forth.

As with four-hands transcriptions of great orchestral works such as Debussy’s ‘La mer’ or Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’, the sound experience will of course be very different but no less engaging. Details such as Brahms’s mastery of counterpoint and the weaving of individual instrumental lines may even come across more keenly and with unexpected clarity in the piano duet version (known as the ‘London Version’ of the German Requiem, following its first performance in this version in 1871). There are places where we will strive to imitate the sound of the rising arpeggios in the harp, for example at the end of the first and seventh movements, the repeated triplet rhythms in the timpani (2nd movement) or even the full colour of Brahms’s gorgeous orchestration (at least, we’ll have this sound very much in mind..) at the climax of the Requiem during the 6th movement.”

Bath Camerata and Piano 4 Hands’ first performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem is on Saturday 29 February in Malmesbury Abbey. 

For full details and tickets:  www.bathcamerata.co.uk/concerts