The 20-year-old Johannes Brahms was on his first big tour as a piano accompanist when he met a new friend who made the introduction of a lifetime, setting him up to go visit Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. Robert Schumann became a powerful mentor and champion, nurturing Brahms’ natural tendencies to root his music in the storied lineage of German-speaking composers that encompassed Beethoven and Mendelssohn, back to Haydn and Mozart, all the way to Bach and Handel. When Schumann’s mental health collapsed soon after, leaving him institutionalized for the last two years of his life, Brahms moved into the Schumann household to help manage their affairs while Clara, one of the great virtuoso pianists of her generation, kept the family afloat with concert tours. She and Brahms were entangled in a hard-to-define (and by all accounts unconsummated) situationship, and after he moved out they remained dear friends and musical confidantes for the next forty years, until she died one year before he did.

Brahms poured his affection for Clara and their shared devotion to music’s past into the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, which he offered in 1861 as a present for her 42nd birthday. She performed it later that year, but he had trouble getting it published, even after pleading his case in a letter to his publisher, calling it his “favorite work” and “much better than my earlier ones.” 

It is no wonder that a publisher looking for a quick profit would be puzzled by Brahms’ impractical score. It begins with a direct transcription of an aria from a keyboard suite by Handel, whose music was mostly brushed off at that time as hopelessly old-fashioned, when it was even remembered at all. As themes go, the one Brahms chose is simple bordering on banal, ranging up and down one octave of the B-flat major scale in two repeated, four-measure phrases. Whereas most composers of variations sets were content to decorate around the margins of the melody, Brahms took his cue from Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and Beethoven’s “Eroica” and “Diabelli” Variations in crafting a massive structure that extracts every drop of potential from the limited thematic material. 

Handel’s melody is the least important element in Brahms’ treatment, which instead focuses on the underlying harmonic structure. After 25 diverse variations in major and minor keys and all manner of textures and moods, the work closes with a tour de force of a fugue. This new orchestration by the composer and pianist Michael Stephen Brown, commissioned by Orpheus as part of its ongoing initiative to expand the Romantic repertoire for chamber orchestra, uses a small ensemble of soloists to illuminate and magnify all the subtleties of Brahms’ forward-thinking tribute to the past.