His music may not sound like Brahms, but the American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has more in common with the 19th-century German composer than one may think. Mehldau’s brilliantly crafted improvisations often feel as if they’ve been conceived organically. Musical lines are shaped and transformed from the get-go in a manner that resembles Brahms’s developing variation technique. So when Mehldau briefly set aside his extemporisations to compose a piece for piano and orchestra, it’s no surprise that he took inspiration from Brahms and the variation form.

Described by Mehldau as imagining Brahms waking up one day and ‘having the blues’, Variations on a Melancholy Theme was originally written as a solo piano piece for Kirill Gerstein in 2012. A year later Mehldau himself performed the work in a revised and reorchestrated version with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. It is this version that is heard on this Nonesuch recording.

Developing variations aside, one never quite knows what to expect with Mehldau. Recent releases have ranged from ‘classical’ (such as his 2018 homage to JS Bach, ‘After Bach’ – 6/18) to the pulsing patterns of pop and electronica that form the backdrop to the Grammy Award-winning Finding Gabriel (2019). Variations on a Melancholy Theme sounds tame by comparison.

Mehldau’s innate understanding of developing variation nevertheless allows him to subvert what often appears to lie simply on the music’s surface. The waltz-like theme that underpins the Variations is itself a coat of many colours – knitted together from what could easily have been the offcuts of old show tunes, blues figures or ragtime riffs.

Echoes of Gershwin, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer-era and mid-20th-century light music imbue the sound of the opening variations. The flavour of mid-century modernism becomes more evident in the middle set, with Bartók-style rhythms leading on to more astringent dissonances in the seventh. The process is then reversed from the midpoint of the set. Piano and orchestra engage in a more dialogic relationship with each other, and the concluding set, followed by cadenza and postlude, returns to the spirit of the opening. Nevertheless, there’s a final twist in the tail when two far more inventive and free-spirited variations (called ‘X’ and ‘Y’) are thrown in at the end on solo piano: a mesmerising Ligeti-meets-Monk moment with Mehldau on top form. Brahms would surely have approved.