Brahms's Symphony No 1
Gardiner's Brahms First with the ORR
Introduction
Variously described as 'Beethoven's Tenth Symphony' (Bülow) and 'the greatest First Symphony in the history of music', this masterpiece was written when Brahms was in his mid-forties, finally confident in his ability to handle symphonic form. It is a work of intensity and epic proportions, which is why Brahms came to be hailed as Beethoven's successor in this genre. Indeed, the most famous theme of the work (the second subject of the finale) has a striking and celebrated similarity to the Ode to Joy in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. 'Any fool can see that,' snapped Brahms when someone pointed it out.
Gramophone Choice
Symphony No 1
Coupled with Begräbnisgesang, Op 13*. Schicksalslied, Op 54*
Mendelssohn Mitten wir in Leben sind, Op 23*
*Monteverdi Choir; Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique / Sir John Eliot Gardiner
Soli Deo Gloria SDG702 (75’ · DDD · T/t). Recorded live 2007. Buy from Amazon
Part of a project whose purpose is to contextualise Brahms’s four symphonies and German Requiem, this is a record that needs to be heard chronologically and complete, not cherry-picked for individual items.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s project promises to bring into play the work of Schütz and Gabrieli, along with choral pieces by admired contemporaries. Here Mendelssohn is the representative ‘other’, his superb Mitten wir, composed three years before Brahms’s birth. It is flanked by Brahms’s Begräbnisgesang (1858), a threnody for chorus, winds and timpani that openly anticipates the second movement of the German Requiem, and the sublime yet troubled Hölderlin-inspired Schicksalslied (‘Song of Destiny’, 1868‑71) which can be seen as a pendant to the Requiem.
Brahms’s setting of Hölderlin’s poem was controversial. Where Hölderlin supplants his opening vision of celestial quiet with images of the hell of earthly existence, Brahms ends by revisiting that celestial vision in a ruefully beautiful orchestral coda in C major. Schicksalslied tells us a good deal about the First Symphony. In Gardiner’s powerful juxtaposition, the descent from that rueful C major coda to the C minor of the symphony’s tumultuous opening is a true coup de théâtre, the terrible enactment of another Fall.
These are intensely dramatic performances, powerful and unmanicured. The gathering drama of the three choral pieces is channelled and unleashed in a towering account of the First Symphony’s opening movement. When Klemperer conducted the symphony in Los Angeles in 1941 a player recalled: ‘He drove, as in a huge chariot, to the highest planes of expression.’ There is something of that spirit here in Gardiner’s gaunt, no-holds-barred account of the work.
The use of period instruments and their deployment in the brooding acoustic of Paris’s Salle Wagram are clearly factors in the performance’s wider impact. It has to be said that the playing in the symphony’s middle movements is rather rough and ready. In the third movement, which under Gardiner is neither allegretto nor grazioso, Sir Charles Mackerras’s historically informed Scottish Chamber Orchestra version (Telarc) is much to be preferred. Not that comparisons matter. This is a mighty Brahms First which, like the programme it inhabits, is a thing sufficient unto itself.
Additional Recommendations
Symphony No 1
Coupled with Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Hungarian Dance No 14 (arr Fischer)
Budapest Festival Orchestra / Iván Fischer
Channel Classics CCSSA28309 (67’ · DDD/DSD) Buy from Amazon
The decision to begin this disc with Iván Fischer’s own arrangement for strings of Brahms’s soulful Hungarian Dance in D minor puts down a marker. This is Brahms seen from the perspective of the borderlands to the east of Vienna, Brahms Hungarian-style.
Fischer and his decidedly classy Budapest orchestra treat the Variations as an affectionate tribute to Haydn, an east-of-Vienna man if ever there was one. Finely sprung and nicely styled, the performance even has its own zigeunerisch dimension – in the finale where Brahms’s witty and heroic use of the triangle is neatly pointed. A superlative recording helps.
And what of the symphony, which Fischer describes with Polonius-like elaboration as Brahms’s first ‘German Hungarian Gypsy Swiss Austrian symphony’? This too is a vibrant affair, stylish and alert, played with clarity and sheen (and the merest hint of string portamento).
Fischer brings out the dance element in the first-movement Allegro, the music’s youthful purpose. After a slow movement exquisitely voiced on the orchestra, the third movement has a pace and grace that again seems decidedly Hungarian. Fischer is comprehensively floored by the weirdly fluctuating pizzicato transition near the start of the finale but poise and momentum are soon restored. The symphony’s peroration is more than usually fiery.
This is a more extrovert reading than many you will hear, less burdened. Conscious of this, and perhaps wanting to have the best of both worlds, Fischer plays the lyric sections of the first movement rather broadly and begins drawing down the coda a whole 20 bars before the brief 15‑bar meno allegro Brahms asks for. Furtwängler did something similar but subtly and disarmingly. Since Fischer’s command of a subtly fluctuating pulse is not in the Furtwängler league, the effect seems manufactured. Better conduct your own Brahms well than someone else’s badly. Happily, for most of the performance Fischer does just that.
Symphony No 1
Coupled with Wagner Siegfried Idyll. Siegfried – Siegfried’s horn-call
Dennis Brain (hn) Philharmonia Orchestra / Guido Cantelli
Testament mono SBT1012 (62‘ · ADD). Recorded 1947-53. Buy from Amazon
Cantelli conducts an interpretation which is free of any idiosyncrasy. Yet there’s an extraordinary electricity in his conducting, a sense of concentration and conviction which lifts the performance into one of the greatest ever set down on record. The fiery young Italian makes the vintage Philharmonia play in an inspired fashion, and the 1953 mono recording is very acceptable. A slightly edgy string sound betrays the 1951 origin of the Siegfried Idyll recording, but the performance has a tenderness, warmth and eloquence which has never been surpassed. Dennis Brain’s exuberant horn-call completes a very desirable Testament disc.
Symphony No 1*
Coupled with Mozart Symphony No 36, ‘Linz’, K425**
Philharmonia Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini
BBC Legends *mono BBCL4175-2 (76’ · ADD). Recorded live *1962; **1982. Buy from Amazon
Giulini appears to have taken Mozart’s festive and eloquent Linz Symphony into his repertory when he was in his mid-50s, though as we know from his unsurpassed recording of Don Giovanni, his interpretations which arrived, as it were, out of the blue, always came fully formed. This live 1982 Proms performance (Giulini made no commercial recording of the Linz) is a joy to hear: vital, companionable, generous-spirited.
The celebrated recording which Bruno Walter made, with attendant rehearsal sequences, with the Columbia SO in 1955 for CBS was very similar. Indeed, that may well have been Giulini’s model (he had greatly admired Walter’s conducting when he played under him in Rome’s Augusteo Orchestra in the 1930s). ‘Authenticists’ will no doubt sniff at the full-bodied sonorities here (did Mozart dream of anything less?) and the non-antiphonal disposition of the violins, though they would be ill-advised to do so. Rarely has the symphony’s important second violin part been as carefully, or as eloquently, attended to as here.
And, of course, Giulini knows the symphony’s anatomical make-up as well as anyone. At the technical level, this is a wonderfully articulated performance, with clean yet pliant rhythms (the work’s trademark trills tautly but expressively attended to), and well terraced wind and string sonorities. The only thing to be regretted is an exposition repeat in the finale.
The Brahms could not be more different. Recorded at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival in dry, immediate, somewhat acidulous mono sound, it bears about as much relation to the Mozart as a Fragonard landscape does to a grainy black-and-white photograph of Berlin after the blitz. This is a quite literally terrific performance. The physiognomy is recognisably that of Giulini’s three studio recordings: powerful, imposing, superbly sculpted. What those recordings don’t have is the sense of a performance taking shape in the shadow of an apocalypse. So great is the tension, Giulini even moves the finale’s big tune on at a half-decent pace, something he was generally loath to do.
DVD Recommendation
Symphonies Nos 1 and 2
West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Cologne / Semyon Bychkov
Video director Hans Hadulla
ArtHaus Musik 101 243 (156’ · NTSC · 16:9 · PCM stereo, 5.1 and DTS 5.1 · 0). Includes ‘The Horizon Moves With You’ – a portrait of Semyon Bychkov. Buy from Amazon
It’s a long time since we’ve had such satisfying accounts of either work, free of any idiosyncrasies, adeptly paced and in a clear, warm acoustic. The oboe(s), clarinet(s) and horns make outstanding contributions. Visually, Hans Hadulla (director) and Lothar Mattner (editor) are classy and imaginative without being intrusive (except, arguably, at the end of the First Symphony); they make the most of the medium and eschew any gimmickry. Particularly fine are the long steadicam shots that introduce and end each performance.
The documentary on Bychkov also comes highly recommended – international locations, crisply and atmospherically shot, eloquent contributions from the conductor, and a particularly touching sequence as he celebrates the 95th birthday of his teacher, Ilya Musin.
