Minor Concerto.
March 14, 1902.
Anyone who knows his interpretation of Bach's A minor Concerto can scarcely help associating Dr. Brodsky with that work very much as one associates Joachim with Beethoven's, and Sarasate with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. There is no other work that gives us so much of Bach's musical individuality within the scope of a clear, simple, and widely intelligible scheme. Bach made no music for the theatre, the casino, or the fashionable ballroom. He seems to have written almost exclusively for the church and for innocent, paternally safeguarded merry-making. He was a good old patriarch who composed either to praise God or to help the young people enjoy themselves—for if anyone imagines that Bach's gigues, gavottes, sarabandes, and so forth were not meant for actual dancing he is greatly mistaken. In such works as the Concertos one may still trace the twofold impulse clearly enough, though all is idealised, structurally elaborated, and otherwise adapted to a purely artistic purpose. For in the first movement of the A minor Concerto—Dr. Brodsky's special piece—we have something that brings the spirit into the proper atmosphere. Bach takes us, as it were, to church, composing our minds, as we go, with strong and able talk about subjects appropriate to the religious season and the service that we are to attend. The second movement is the service, and the Finale is the afternoon walk or dance; Bach would probably have approved of Sunday dancing. Dr. Brodsky is unsurpassable in the andante, where the powerful, composed, and majestic rhythm of the bass finds a poetic and delicately fanciful commentary in the solo part. Here one perceives the difference between Bach's and Beethoven's religious standpoint, between the ages of faith and of strife, between the ancien régime and the revolutionary period. For Bach the ancient faith is enough, while in the spirit of Beethoven there ferment, fume and rage the ideas of the French Revolution. The Hellmesberger cadenza played by Dr. Brodsky in the Finale is perhaps the best-written excursus of its kind in existence. It passes in review the thematic material of the entire work, with unfailing felicity of touch, and good judgment as to the amount of development; and the extremely rich and florid figuration is all so neatly spun out of elements contained in the body of the work, that it seems to have grown where we find it hanging, and has no suggestion of anything alien about it.