Kleiner Brahms Esoteric

First of all, the Brahms selections are among the finest in the entire Richter the Master series. As a glance at the online Richter discography discloses, the two sonata aren't the same readings as on a previous Decca release. Sonatas no. 1 and no. 2 are from the same recital in Tours, June 19, 1988, the year that the great man turned 73. The live recording is closely miked bu clear and full, and despite complaints about his hard touch, it's not anything beyond what we often hear from Richter; consult the more mercurial and restless Decca account for a fair comparison. In fact, it's short-sighted to fault any of Philips' recordings for sound quality given the often abysmal sonics on countless live concerts taped on the fly by amateurs, the Soviets, and various radio stations.

With the proliferation of more and more recording labels and still more ensembles getting the opportunity to record their work, it is obviously increasingly difficult to bring anything truly original when performing works from the standard repertoire. Unfortunately, this fact may lead to some questionable performance decisions in striving for originality. Such seems to be the case with the Leopold String Trio and Marc-André Hamelin and their performance of the Brahms piano quartets.

Originally released between 1976 and 2007, the offerings in this eight-CD box set represent Maurizio Pollini's exemplary concerto recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, including all of Ludwig van Beethoven's cycle, the two piano concertos by Johannes Brahms, and six of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's masterpieces in performances that rank among the pianist's finest.

After Igor Levit, Christian Thielemann, and the Vienna Philharmonic performed Brahms’ First Piano Concerto at Vienna’s famous Musikverein in April 2024 the Viennese newspaper The Standard wrote: “During these fifty minutes, an irresistible dose of emotion was conveyed – but at the same time the sophisticated structure of Brahms’ masterpiece remained crystal clear.” Four months earlier after their performance of the Second Piano Concerto, the Austrian newspaper Die Presse had declared that “Igor Levit sets a new gold standard for Brahms.”

Joseph Keilberth conducts Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 with a stern lyricism not unlike that found on George Szell’s Cleveland recording. Keilberth’s quick tempos, sensitive yet unsentimental phrasing (particularly so in the first movement), and clear textures make the music sound with a compelling freshness and vibrancy that you would better expect from a modern authentic-style performance than one from December, 1966. If anything, the Brahms Second is even finer. A wholly natural flow characterizes this reading, as if the music were a living thing, devoid of any need for interventionist interpretation. Under Keilberth the first movement’s melancholy tinged with joyfulness emerges freely, while the Adagio emerges as a single rapturous, cogent paragraph. Even the studied finale relaxes and sounds less rigorously Beethovenian.

Like Paavo Berglund’s Sibelius symphony recordings, also with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, these Brahms performances inject a certain novelty that will be appreciated especially by the listener who has wearied of them due to excessive repetition. While these are not radically desiccated renditions in the manner of Chailly or Harnoncourt, the COE’s smaller-scaled string body does require a bit of time at first for your ear to adjust to the thinner timbres. But the reward is a harvest of inner detail, much of it barely audible in full-size orchestral performances (but well captured by Ondine’s vivid recordings), which continually surprises and delights.

The Cleveland Orchestra is the "aristocrat among American orchestras" (The Telegraph), and the ensemble's music director Franz Welser-Most, leads them with verve and precision. These three discs from Belvedere (DVD and Blu-ray) feature six and a half hours of music, presenting a cycle of all the major orchestral works of Johannes Brahms. Included are the complete Symphonies and Piano Concertos, the Violin Concerto, the Tragic Overture, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Haydn Variations. Soloists include violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Yefim Bronfman.

The Cleveland Orchestra is the "aristocrat among American orchestras" (The Telegraph), and the ensemble's music director Franz Welser-Most, leads them with verve and precision. These three discs from Belvedere (DVD and Blu-ray) feature six and a half hours of music, presenting a cycle of all the major orchestral works of Johannes Brahms. Included are the complete Symphonies and Piano Concertos, the Violin Concerto, the Tragic Overture, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Haydn Variations. Soloists include violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Yefim Bronfman.

The variety here is more in the programming than in the playing. Dvorak’s Romantic Pieces open to a brand of melodic effusion that every household would know if more violinists chose the set as regular repertory. The original was scored for two violins and viola, but the violin-and-piano version is equally effective. Akiko Suwanai plays them well, and both she and Boris Berezovsky are especially successful at sustaining the long-breathed Larghetto.

"The main attraction on this disc is the Berio orchestral arrangement of the Clarinet Sonata op.120/1. Like Schoenberg, it’s a harmonically and melodically “straight” transcription, not a modern re-imagining of the work. Berio, no stranger to orchestrations and adaptations - Puccini’s Turandot, works by Schubert, Mahler, and Verdi - tackled this last major work of Brahms’ for reasons we don’t know. Iosif Raiskin speculates that the tinges of Mahler in late Brahms may have been a reason for the Mahler-loving Berio. Be that as it may, the result is a wonderfully graceful Brahms Clarinet Concerto.