Gould/Brahms 4 Ballades, Op.10

The Ballades, Op. 10, are lyrical piano pieces written by Johannes Brahms during his youth. They were dated 1854 and were dedicated to his friend Julius Otto Grimm. Their composition coincided with the beginning of the composer's lifelong affection for the pianist and composer Clara Schumann, who was helping Brahms launch his career. Frédéric Chopin had written the last of his famous ballades only 12 years earlier, but Brahms approached the genre differently from Chopin, choosing to take its origin in narrative poetry more literally.

Brahms's ballades are arranged in two pairs of two, the members of each pair being in parallel keys. The first ballade was inspired by a Scottish poem "Edward" found in a collection Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern compiled by Johann Gottfried Herder. It is also one of the best examples of Brahms's bardic or Ossianic style; its open fifths, octaves, and simple triadic harmonies are supposed to evoke the sense of a mythological past.

Gould talked at lenght about recording the 4 Ballades. "I'd never played them before never even sight-read them and (apart from the first of them, which many of my fellow students had had a go at) I'd never heard them in the concert-hall either, when I decided to make the recording. I took the decision around two months before the recording sessions were due to begin and during the next six weeks I glanced at the music from time to time, until I had a clear idea on how I wanted to tackle the Ballades. But as for playing them, it wasn't until two weeks before the recording that I sat down at the piano, working on average no more than one hour a day, as I usually did before a recording session. In that one hour I could play through all four Ballades twice they last more or less exactly 30 minutes and at the same time consider whatever changes needed to be made to my concept. In addition needless to say there were the dozens of occasions when I went through the Ballades in my head, during lengthly car journeys or in my apartment, where I in any case do most of my work."

Brahms: 4 Ballades, Op.10 (1854)

No.1 in D minor "Edward Ballade" Andante 6'48"

No.2 in D major Andante 8'35"

No.3 "Intermezzo" in B minor Allegro 4'37"

No.4 in B major Andante con moto 9'38"

Recorded in New York, February 8, 9, 10/1982