Brahms Symphonies Studio Master

This comprehensive overview of Johannes Brahms's orchestral works includes several rarities, among them world premieres of two piano intermezzi orchestrated by Paul Klengel (brother of the Gewandhaus's long-standing principal cellist Julius Klengel) and the original first performance version of the Andante of Symphony No. 1 and the even rarer revised opening of the Fourth Symphony.

Originally released in 1965, this Deutsche Grammophon digital transfer sees the legendary team of the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan perform all four of Brahms's symphonies. This was their first recording of the cycle together and is a testament to their unique and extremely rich interpretations of this Romantic master's orchestral works.

With almost 450 years of tradition, Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the oldest orchestras in the world. Originally founded as court orchestra by Prince-Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1570 the ensemble expanded its activities with the founding of the Royal Court Opera in 1742 by Frederick the Great.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons are pleased to release their latest recordings on BSO Classics–a three-disc set of the four Brahms symphonies, recorded live during concert performances at Symphony Hall in November 2016, engineered by the same in-house team that produced the BSO's Grammy-winning Shostakovich recordings under Maestro Nelsons on Deutsche Grammophon. This new Brahms symphony cycle follows two others recorded previously by the BSO, under Erich Leinsdorf in the mid-1960s and Bernard Haitink in the early 1990s. ''It makes me so proud and happy,'' observes Andris Nelsons, ''that the Boston Symphony Orchestra of today, filled with so many great musicians, will now have its own place in recorded history with this amazing music.''

"The Brahms project with the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in 2007 was a thrilling undertaking - a thorough reappraisal of Brahms's sound world, both in terms of period instruments and a study of the surviving evidence of performance practice.

The time when performers and composers had personal mottoes – Wieniawski's "Il faut risquer" (I must risk it), Joachim's "Frei aber einsam" (Free but lonely), Brahms' "Frei aber froh" (Free but happy) – is long since past, but still such mottoes are more than just biographical curiosities: there are at least two very well-recognized musical encryptions of those mottoes. Schumann, Albert Dietrich, and Brahms put their collective talents together to compose the "F-A-E" Sonata as a gift for Joachim, and, when Brahms came up with his own motto, he decided to use the pitches of its initials – F-A-F – as the motto theme for his Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90.

Klemperer and Brahms had much in common, which may go some way to explaining the empathy with which Klemperer conducts the works of the great composer. As Richard Osborne says in the accompanying liner notes: ‘no detail was insignificant, yet none was allowed to subvert the larger whole’. The recordings in this box have all been remastered in HD from original tapes for the Otto Klemperer Complete Edition in 2023.

Kurt Sanderling was one of the great Brahms conductors and many who believe his recordings, especially this cycle from Dresden in 1971-72 is among the greatest ever! Like Karajan, he had a great sense of the musical line, and like Giulini he gave has musicians space to create their own parts organically with their own personalities shining through, but most importantly one immediately gets the sense from the first note, that Sanderling already hears the last note and knows exactly how he intends to get there.

The two stereo Beethoven cycles, those of the Symphonies (1965–70) and the Piano Concertos (with Wilhelm Backhaus, 1958–59), form the core of this edition of the complete Decca recordings of Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (1900–1973).