Kleiner Brahms Esoteric

These recordings of live LPO concerts at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall between 2008 and 2011. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (February 2010), received great critical acclaim including BBC Music Magazine's Disc of the Month' and the recommended version of Symphony No. 2 by BBC Radio 3's Building a Library'. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 was also praised in the press, with Gramophone describing the LPO as London's finest Brahms orchestra' and The Financial Times writing that Jurowski marries the best of tradition with the best of modern practice'.

Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured. Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new. Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements.

This recording provides a prime example of why the late Istvan Kertesz has been one of those conductors whose interpretations of works by Brahms and Dvorak have consistently given me great pleasure. At various places in these serenades, he displays an extroverted, outdoorsy quality that allows melodies to soar. In addition, while listening recently to Sir Charles Mackerras' versions of these scores, where that conductor uses a down-sized orchestra, I found myself preferring Kertesz's suppleness and color, the latter enhanced obviously by the use of a somewhat larger orchestra.

This release by Norwegian cellist Jonathan Aasgaard (the principal cellist of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra) and British pianist Martin Roscoe purports to be a complete recording of Brahms' music for cello and piano. In fact it's padded with quite a few other things that have little or nothing to do with Brahms other than the fact that he composed the original music.

Seeing a Sinfonia in B of Brahms in an online list of work titles will puzzle most listeners. A closer look reveals a work that's doubly unusual: Swedish conductor and violinist Joseph Swensen has made an orchestral transcription of the Brahms Trio in B major, Op. 8, and he has used the early and rarely heard 1853 version of the piece. Swensen is right that the early version, filled with effusive Schumann-like melody that was redone into complex motivic work in the revision, is worth more frequent hearings, and it goes well with the smaller pieces included: orchestrated versions of the three Romances for violin and piano, Op. 22, of Clara Schumann, and two movements of the even rarer F-A-E Sonata composed collaboratively by Schumann, Brahms, and Albert Dietrich (the initials stood for "Frei Aber Einsam," or free but lonely, the personal motto of violinist Joseph Joachim, the work's dedicatee).

Over the past 100 years, there have been recordings of the complete Brahms' symphonies that rank with the greatest recordings of anything ever made. There are wonderful Weingartners, the fabulous Furtwänglers, the monumental Klemperers, the amazing Abbados…the list goes on and on. Of course, over the past 100 years, there have been recordings of Brahms symphonies that rank among the worst recordings of anything ever made. There are the obdurate Davalos, the superficial Karajans, and the uncomprehending Jarvis…again, the list goes on and on.