I gradually backtracked though….maybe a few knocks on the road woke me up to what he was talking about.

I remember crashing through a two piano version of the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto with a student friend when we were young and reckless enough to try such things.

It probably sounded terrible but we loved it and were transported to that special place where performers, even clumsy musicians like me, meet those long-dead but immortal composers.

Just a thought about those Scherzi. Brahms did seem to use them, like his jolly but not always profound Hungarian Dance endings to works, as deliberately lightweight movements – maybe he thought the more the merrier in the Serenade but I guess you could well be right about his motives.

He did reject the idea of lighter works being called symphonies – this was the time when a lot of French composers were writing serenade-like symphonies (Gounod for instance). Whether he was disguising symphony-wannabes out of insecurity or because he hadn’t yet worked out how to make a piece grow until the last movement becomes the climax in his works, I don’t know.

It used to surprize me that , even when he did finally get round to writing his First Symphony, he still used a light scherzo as the third movement.

Maybe, of course, he just liked them. It might have brought out the pub pianist in him or the man who loved sitting in the park listening to Johann Strauss conducting The Blue Danube.

I certainly hope so.

Thanks for taking the time to write. I look forward to future comments which, I am sure, will keep me on my toes.

There’s an early serenade for orchestra that I think could have been Brahms’ first symphony if he’d had the guts. It’s relatively lightweight but it has a fully-developed sonata movement, a beautiful slow movement, a delightful finale….and THREE scherzi. I can never escape the theory that he threw in the extra scherzi to avoid calling it a symphony.

When I was in college a friend–we had played violin together in high school and then gone on to the same college–dragged me into a cramped rehearsal cubicle in the music building (we weren’t music majors, weren’t even taking any music classes at the time, so it seemed faintly illicit) and we sight-read the solo parts of the Bach double concerto. We weren’t very good, but I remember what a startlingly visceral experience it was to make music so intertwined with another person. Thanks for triggering the memory.