Brahms's Symphonies Nos 1-4 (complete sets)
Harnoncourt's Brahms with the BPO (Teldec)
Gramophone Choice
Symphonies Nos 1-4.
Coupled with Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Academic Festival Overture. Tragic Overture
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Teldec 0630 13136-2 (3h 34‘ · DDD). Recorded live 1996-97. Buy from Amazon
Any fears that Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Brahms will be quirky, provocative or abrasive can be dispelled. There are interpretative novelties (freshly considered articulation and clarified counterpoint) and the Berlin strings project a smooth, curvaceous profile. Harnoncourt makes a beeline for the brass, and the horns in particular. The live recordings have remarkable presence and are mostly cough-free.
The First Symphony’s opening Un poco sostenuto seems a trifle soft-grained but the pounding basses from bar 25 are beautifully caught and the first-movement Allegro is both powerful and broadly paced. The Andante sostenuto slow movement is both limpid and conversational, with trance-like dialogue between oboe and clarinet and sparing use of vibrato among the strings. Harnoncourt makes real chamber music of the third movement, though he drives the Trio section to a fierce climax, and the finale’s first accelerating pizzicatos are truly stringendo poco a poco – the excitement certainly mounts, but only gradually. The Second Symphony’s first movement is relatively restrained. Harnoncourt’s strategy is to deliver a sombre exposition and a toughened development. Again, the slow movement is fluid and intimate, with some tender string playing. The third movement’s rustling Trio is disarmingly delicate and the finale, tightly held, keenly inflected and heavily accented: the coda threatens to break free and the effect is thrilling.
First impressions of the Third Symphony suggest a marginal drop in intensity, yet the first movement’s peroration is so powerful that there’s a retrospective suspicion that all the foregoing was mere preparation. The middle movements work well but the rough-hewn, flexibly phrased finale really makes the performance.
Like the Third, the Fourth opens with less import than some of its older rivals, yet the development intensifies perceptibly, the recapitulation’s hushed piano dolce opening bars are held on the edge of a breath and the coda is recklessly headstrong. The slow movement has some heartfelt moments, the top-gear Scherzo is quite exhilarating and the finale forged with the noble inevitability of a Baroque passacaglia. Ultimately, Harnoncourt delivers a fine and tragic Fourth. Harnoncourt’s Brahms is the perfect antidote to predictability and interpretative complacency.
Additional Recommendations
Symphonies Nos 1-4
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Simon Rattle
EMI 267254-2 (151’ · DDD). Recorded live 2008. Buy from Amazon
Consistently satisfying cycles of the four Brahms symphonies are rare on record. Not the least of the problems is the dichotomy that exists between the First and Third symphonies – both deeply personal works – and their musical antitypes, the organically conceived and wondrously self-sufficient Second and Fourth symphonies. It requires a particular kind of mind and technique to cope with these immensities.
Forging a comparable discourse with the Berlin Philharmonic is no easy task, as Simon Rattle is no doubt shrewdly aware. Furtwängler had his own methods, drawing without fear or favour on the orchestra’s richly layered sound and visceral manner. A First and Third man, he highlighted the darker elements of the Second and treated the Fourth as unmitigated tragedy. Karajan, a Second and Fourth man who spent 50 years grappling with the First like a climber confronting some unattainable Alpine peak, first clarified the Berlin sound, then rebuilt it to epic proportions, as we can hear in his 1987 DG recording of the First or the tumultuous performance of that same symphony he conducted in London in October 1988 (Testament).
After Rattle’s radically styled Vienna Philharmonic Beethoven cycle, you might imagine that his Brahms would be closer to Harnoncourt’s than Karajan’s. This is not the case. Taking on the mantle of conductor as custodian, he has gone back to the pre-1989 way of doing things. Where Harnoncourt rather underplays the First Symphony, giving it a decorous Schumannesque feel, Rattle’s reading is one in which the inwardness and charm of the exquisitely realised inner movements offset the breadth and lyric power of the surrounding drama. Less riven than Furtwängler’s reading or the later Karajan’s, it is a powerfully directed performance, measured and humane.
The EMI recording is an ‘in concert’ affair, more closely focused, with a less natural-sounding ambience than the recording Teldec gave Harnoncourt in this same hall (the Berlin Philharmonie). Impressive in the First Symphony, it seems cloudier and more claustrophobic in the Second. Clearly the reading has something to do with this, with its bottom-heavy string sound and evened-out dynamics. There’s a lack of narrative variation here; too little play of light and shade as we journey through the symphony’s changing landscapes.
We return to memorability in the Third where we hear again the kind of exquisitely quiet string- and horn-playing – the inner movements rich in beauty and quiet foreboding – which we missed in the Second. Here Rattle’s finely moulded direction sustains the discourse. Tension occasionally slackens in meditative passages but this is preferable to the unnuanced approach we have in the Second Symphony.
Sadly the performance of the Fourth is again bottom-heavy, with slowish tempi that rob the music of its edge and tragic severity. Still, two successes out of four is not bad. In the great Brahms handicap that’s about par for the course.
Symphonies Nos 1-4.
Coupled with Tragic Overture. Variations on a Theme by Haydn
Philharmonia Orchestra / Arturo Toscanini
Testament mono SBT3167 (3h 20‘ · ADD) Recorded live 1952. Buy from Amazon
The concerts recorded here preserve the two legendary occasions in the autumn of 1952 when Toscanini conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, then only six years old but already the front runner among London orchestras. The recording itself, now legendary, has generated pirated versions, but never before has the original made by EMI, under the supervision of Walter Legge, been officially released. Testament’s remastering is a revelation. This new set brings the clearest of demonstrations that the RCA recordings of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra made during the last years of his life (including his Brahms cycle of the very same 12-month period) give only an imperfect picture of a conductor who at the time, and for a generation or previously, was almost universally counted the greatest in the world. That reputation has been eroded over the years, but this issue may help to put the record straight.
Take for example the quite different NBC version of No 3 that he recorded in New York barely a month after this performance: as Alan Sanders says in his note, a ‘rhythmically staid recording which entirely lacked the lyricism and eloquence of the Philharmonia performance’. His description points to the marked contrasts, not only in No 3 but in all four symphonies. Whereas the New York performances, resonant and superbly drilled, have a hardness and rigidity, with the dynamic contrasts ironed out, thus eliminating pianissimos (partly a question of recording balance), the Philharmonia’s consistently bring a moulding of phrase and subtlety of rubato which bears out the regular Toscanini instructions to ‘Sing!’. And in contrast with most Toscanini recordings, the hushed playing is magical. The New York players, by comparison, seem to have forgotten how to respond to the finer subtleties of this notorious taskmaster among conductors. The extra flexibility of the Philharmonia performances over the NBC has an interesting effect on tempo too. Whereas in No 1 the NBC speeds of 1951 are faster, not just than those of the Philharmonia but of the 1941 NBC performance, in the other three symphonies the Philharmonia timings tend to be a degree quicker, notably in No 3, where for example the Andante flows far better.
Symphonies Nos 1-4
BPO / Herbert von Karajan
DG 477 7579GB3 (188’ · ADD). Buy from Amazon
From the late 1970s, the BPO’s Brahms sound glows under Karajan’s total command. (Don’t confuse this with his later, more expensive, very similar digital recordings.)
Symphonies Nos 1-4.
Coupled with Haydn Variations. Academic Festival Overture. Tragic Overture. Alto Rhapsody
Christa Ludwig (mez) Philharmonia / Otto Klemperer
EMI 562742-2 (156’ · ADD). Buy from Amazon
A set that shows Klemperer at his finest: there is a power and strength that inspires real admiration. The Philharmonia plays with burning passion.
Symphonies Nos 1-4
Coupled with Violin Concerto (Szeryng), Double Concerto (Szeryng, Starker), piano concertos (Arrau), Hungarian Dances, Haydn Variations and serenades
Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink
Philips 478 2365 (7h 15’ · ADD). Buy from Amazon
Exquisitely phrased, elegant Brahms from one of the world’s great orchestras in a seven-disc set that embraces nearly all of Brahms’s symphonic output
Symphonies Nos 1-4
Coupled with Hungarian Dances. Beethoven: Coriolan Overture; Leonore No 3
BPO, VPO / Wilhelm Furtwängler
EMI mono 565513-2 (3h 39’ · ADD). Buy from Amazon
Perhaps the historic choice (1948-52) and a fine example of Furtwängler’s incandescent art: the Fourth positively drips with tragedy.
Symphonies Nos 1-4
Coupled with Tragic Overture; Academic Festival Overture, Haydn Variations, Nänie; Alto Rhapsody; Schicksalslied and Gesang der Parzen
BPO / Claudio Abbado
DG 435 683-2GH4 (4h 28’ · DDD). Buy from Amazon
One of the finest – but most expensive – of modern Brahms cycles with stylish, sleek orchestral work.
Symphonies Nos 1-4
North German RSO / Günter Wand
RCA c 74321 89103-2 (158’ · DDD). Buy from Amazon
Wonderfully wise, beautifully prepared performances that speak of a lifetime’s love of this music and thorough familiarity with it.
