BRAHMS: SYMPHONY NO 2, TRAGIC

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 41: All Brahms: 3 Violin & Piano

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 71: Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2

Even toward the end of her career Christa Ludwig was in lustrous voice and sang with an innate understanding of these songs.

Christa Ludwig was one of the leading operatic and recital singers of the post war generation... The disc devoted to lieder makes for very rewarding listening. The groups by Strauss and Mahler strike me as being particularly fine. Even towards the end of her long career Ludwig was able to call upon the resources of tone which these songs so often demand. This is not to imply that the offerings of Schumann or Brahms are in any way inferior. In these, too, she is in lustrous voice and sings with an innate understanding of the idiom. The programme is artfully chosen not only to present composers with whose music Ludwig had a particular affinity but also, just as importantly, with regard to the inevitable limitations the years may have placed upon her vocal resources. Suffice to say there is little or nor hint that we are listening to a singer aged 65. ...[T]he whole lieder recital is taken from a disc entitled ‘Farewell to Salzburg’ and comprises the programme which she chose for her final recital in that city in August 1993. The recordings themselves were made in the previous January during performances in the Schloss Grafenegg in Haitzendorf, Austria... The discs will give much pleasure for they are full of high quality artistry and all admirers of this great singer will want to snap up these recordings.

-- John Quinn, MusicWeb International [reviewing the box set RCA 84597]

BRAHMS: PIANO CONCERTO NO 1 G

BRAHMS: VIOLIN CONCERTO, DOUBL

With this latest release on EMI Classics from Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker the team returns to the 19th-century Germanic repertoire on which the orchestra's heritage has been based since it's formation 125 years ago. Following in the historic footsteps of Klemperer, Celibidache, Tennstedt, Fischer-Dieskau, Schwarzkopf and many other distinguished EMI artists, Simon Rattle brings to the label Brahms's most substantial yet intimate large-scale work.

Classical Music

Brahms: Violin Concerto (2015) Itzhak Perlman, Carlo Maria Giulini, Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Heroic, dramatic, reflective and joyous, Brahms's Violin Concerto - written for the great Joseph Joachim, a close friend of the composer - is one of the monuments of the Romantic repertoire. In a performance of epic sweep, Itzhak Perlman and Carlo Maria Giulini do full justice to it's ambitions.

Classical Music

When Barry Douglas won his first prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1986 he was promptly engaged by Melodiya to record one of the works he had to offer: the Brahms D minor Concerto. Douglas's playing proved to be commending enough but as we can hear on the Olympia/Conifer CD issue of the Melodiya disc, the recording and orchestral playing left a lot to be desired ((CD) OCD137). So this new RCA recording, expertly produced and recorded last February in St Giles, Cripplegate with Skrowaczewski and the LSO, is greatly to be welcomed as the true memento of Douglas's Moscow triumph.

There is never any doubt that Douglas is technically, and in large measure emotionally, in command of this daunting work, and there is far better rapport here between pianist, conductor and orchestra than there was on the Melodiya issue. The slow movement, rapt and serious, is memorably sustained; there is nothing lax about the ensemble, nothing mannered or over-rhetorical about the playing. And the great first movement is held firmly on course. Once or twice I missed the sheer impetus of Szell's great reading with the same orchestra for Curzon on Decca (the leggiero before the recapitulation dancing in a way that fires up the soloist rather than damping him down) but doubts about the initially broad tempo (as broad as Haitink's for Arrau on Philips) were unfounded. Douglas's marvellous realization of the E major recapitulation confirms that this is the tempo he wants, unlike Pollini on an older DG recording who flatly contradicts Bohm's spacious opening at the point of recapitulation. If I have doubt about any of the movements in the new RCA recording, it is the finale. I know Brahms marks it Allegro non troppo but from the outset of the movement there seems here to be a degree of circumspection, the absence of the kind of compelling dynamism that will drive the music on into self-absorbed unity through its several episodes.

Nowadays RCA no longer make concerto recordings with clattery pianos and dimly recessed orchestras. Douglas and his Steinway make a fierce, brilliant sound, but there is much that is exquisitely quiet, especially in the slow movement. The piano is forward but not unduly so, and the sound it makes is not all like polished steel. The orchestra is very naturally recorded, with great depth of field. If anything, the horns, crucial in this work, are almost too atmospherically distant, though it must be said that the quietest pedal note does seem to carry through the texture.

The competition is, of course, formidable. Gilels, whom I occasionally find mannered in this concerto, offers a famous two-CD set of both the Brahms concertos on DG. Arrau is a law unto himself, uniquely searching. His is a fundamentally different kind of reading, touched with youthful energy but with the energy of a youth burdened beyond his years, as Brahms probably felt he was at this time. Curzon could be technically fallible in Brahms but he was a serious and sensitive interpreter of the music and inspired by Szell at his most excoriating he gave a performance of mingled poetry and electricity that even he must have wondered at.

Douglas doesn't displace these masters but he has every right to co-exist with them. As a young Brahmsian he reminds me somewhat of the late Julius Katchen, fearless but sensitive, robust but never crass. Let us hope that RCA will not feed Douglas a diet of popular concertos; Katchen recorded all Brahms's solo piano music, and Douglas ought to be offered some comparable projects. Talent of this order needs space in which to roam and grow.'

-- Richard Osborne, Gramophone [3/1989]

"Gilels made two recordings of this concerto. The later version was made for DG in the early 1970s with Eugen Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and has earned a high reputation over the years. This earlier version, made in January 1958, is no less remarkable and very different. Perhaps it was the temporary transatlantic influence of Reiner and his orchestra which persuaded Gilels to see the concerto as a vehicle for a display of brilliant virtuoso playing, with fast tempos and little relaxation except in the third movement. certainly the playing in the overture has the same characteristics. But when this approach was harnessed to Gilel's intellectual strength the result was a performance of great power." -- The Gramophone

BRAHMS: SYMPHONY NO 2 DAVIS,

Soloist and leader of the Camerata Bern, Antje Weithaas - "For any violinist, the Brahms Concerto is a special challenge and a precious gem, a piece one works on for decades. I studied it more intensely for the first time when I was 18-19; now I'm astounded to note how one's perception of such a work can change so radically. Amongst all violin concertos, Brahms, Beethoven and Mendelssohn play an essential role, and I would add Britten and Shostakovich. The Brahms Violin Concerto is part of our essential repertoire, and was composed at a time when the "customary" violin concerto no longer had any significance as virtuoso display for a soloist (incidentally, that's my own credo as a performer). This is a symphonic work, an aspect that relates it to the recording of Berg and Beethoven I made with Stavanger Symphony Orchestra a couple of years ago. Those two pieces from different stylistic periods are actually works for orchestra with obligato solo violin - and the same applies to the Brahms Concerto. The violin often plays passagework around the orchestra melody, as in the Beethoven Concerto, which is why I find the symphonic approach so important here as well...We tackled the challenge of performing and recording without a conductor. Of course, when I otherwise perform this concerto with a conductor, I intensely learn and think through the orchestra part in my head. It is a challenge I am aware of, and I thus probably would never have had dared to perform this concerto without a conductor. But since I've often performed the Beethoven Concerto with the Camerata Bern without a conductor, I started thinking that the Brahms Concerto just might work as well. Over teh past 7-9 years we have become so well-acquainted with one another on a musical and personal level that by now we manage to communicate with blindfolds on. I probably would not have dared to embark on this adventure with any other ensemble. The most important thing is that each musician should remain in a "chamber music" attitude while providing the necessary symphonic energy and assuming his/her share of responsibility.

BRAHMS GREATEST HITS (ECO-FRIE