Opinion

Can a musician be ‘too young’ for certain repertoire? It may just be coincidence, but I am inclined to think so after hearing two young pianists win major competitions. Over a single weekend in late September 2024, the finals of both the Leeds International and George Enescu competitions took place. I attended the latter, in Bucharest, and saw the 31-year-old Ukrainian pianist Roman Lopatynskyi win over the jurors (or a majority of them, anyway) with a performance of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto which, while confident and big-boned, hardly reached base camp in terms of scaling the expressive demands of the piece. You can judge for yourself on YouTube, just as you can the performance of Jaeden Izik-Djurko, the 24-year-old Canadian pianist who joined a distinguished list of Leeds laureates with the very same Brahms Second.

Long player

We can all play judge and jury in these cases. In the nature of modern televised competitions, we are encouraged to do so. Izik-Djurko’s Brahms, like Lopatynskyi’s, felt constrained by the epic scale of the concerto, which is after all the longest in the standard repertoire. Second prize at the Enescu final was taken by a Russian pianist, Tatiana Dorokhova, with a more sensitive account of Brahms’s First Concerto, albeit one still frozen in a stylistic era dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, inflated to Mahlerian dimensions.

As it happens, Alexander Kantorow triumphed at the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition in 2019, playing Brahms’ Second, and with preternatural maturity and lightness of touch (this, too, can be checked out on YouTube). But overall, mischievously, I would like to propose a moratorium on Brahms concertos at competitions (violin ones too). Partly for the practical reason that the concertos are so long compared to the preparation time available for the contestants with orchestra. These are symphonic works, demanding a level of dialogue between soloist and orchestra that cannot be faked within a brief rehearsal.

Perhaps it looks pretentious to say that young musicians are ‘too young’ for Brahms. But the pianist Beatrice Rana told me recently that she has only just begun to present his solo music in public. She has been playing the First Concerto for some years, but only now, in her early 30s, does she feel she has the life experience to begin grappling with the sonatas. This may seem ironic, given that Brahms was in his early 20s when he wrote them. Nevertheless, some music demands not just years of conservatoire training, but graduation from the school of hard knocks. Around the same time as the competitions, I saw Kirill Petrenko conduct Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, and Sakari Oramo conduct Mahler’s Sixth. In both cases they were doing so for the first time – indeed Petrenko had never conducted any Bruckner before. Yet you would hardly know it.

Youth and maturity – Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Djurko plays Brahms at the Leeds competition while [above] Kirill Petrenko conducts Bruckner at the BBC Prom

Both Oramo and Petrenko were bringing decades of experience – in life and music – to bear on a fresh encounter with a peak of the symphonic repertoire. Of course, unlike solo pianists, they had the advantage of first-class orchestras to back them up (this can be a two-edged sword!). In both pieces there is a rich, often ambiguous and even contradictory inner narrative that, like Brahms’s Second Concerto, cannot be reached by means of diligent study and technical finesse.

Better with age

Brendel has always been notoriously dismissive of his early recordings, made in Vienna in the 1950s for American labels such as Vox. Karajan advised Rattle to ‘throw away your first 100 Beethoven Fifths’ (when Rattle still had 95 to go!). That noted Brucknerian Günter Wand only felt equipped to begin tackling the Fifth in his late 50s. These are ruefully retrospective reflections, whereas Izik-Djurko and Lopatynskyi are entitled to live in the moment. With their triumphs in Leeds and Bucharest, they have a career in front of them. But perhaps they should give Brahms a rest, for now.