BRAHMS Symphonies Nos 3 & 4 - Elbphilharmonie First Recording
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Johannes Brahms
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: Sony Classical
Magazine Review Date: 04/2017
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 75
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 88985 40508-2
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Symphony No. 3 |
Johannes Brahms, Composer
Johannes Brahms, Composer NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester Thomas Hengelbrock, Conductor |
Symphony No. 4 |
Johannes Brahms, Composer
Johannes Brahms, Composer NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester Thomas Hengelbrock, Conductor |
Author: Richard Osborne
The hall is a younger sibling of Hans Scharoun’s game-changing 1963 Berlin Philharmonie. Its ‘vineyard’ layout derives from the Philharmonie, as did Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, another Scharoun- and Karajan-influenced design, whose acoustic engineer Yasuhisa Toyota is also responsible for the Elbphilharmonie. The difference is that where it took several years for the Berlin Philharmonie to become a plausible recording venue, the new hall seems pretty well spot-on from the outset. Try the last movement of the Third Symphony or the Scherzo of the Fourth to sample its qualities.
Hamburg is Brahms’s birthplace and under conductors such as Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt and Günter Wand the NDR Symphony Orchestra has long had a claim to be the authentic voice of North German Brahms. The Brahms readings of the orchestra’s current chief conductor, 58-year-old Thomas Hengelbrock, are more South German in temper but as a generalist well-versed in the craft of conducting he knows his way around the music. The Third Symphony is well suited to his mellower style and is effectively done, a slightly underpowered first movement exposition notwithstanding. I suspect Brahms intended the third-movement Poco allegretto to have more of the feel of an intermezzo about it. What we have here is a second nocturne that further darkens an already darkening landscape. Still, the playing is exquisite; after which the finale is superbly judged.
The disc begins with the Fourth Symphony rather than the Third and with a four-bar plagal cadence which you will find in Brahms’s autograph manuscript but which never reached the printed page – at least not until the movement’s end, where that same cadence brings the music to its appointed close. Sony’s booklet claims this as ‘a world first’, which isn’t strictly true. Riccardo Chailly allows us a chance to hear the cancelled opening in his fine Leipzig cycle (Decca, 10/13) where it’s shrewdly tucked away in a brief appendix.
Apart from that otiose opening and some dynamically misaligned edits (mainly in the same symphony) these are musically agreeable recordings. Where Brahms is concerned, Hamburg has not lost its touch.
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