Brahms remains one of the great staples of the concert world. This year, like every year, you can be sure of hearing many of his major works in our concert halls. Yet while audiences continue to revel in his symphonies, concertos, chamber music and at least some parts of his huge vocal output, it is hard to think of a composer who remains more elusive.
Trying to solve this paradox of Brahms's simultaneous familiarity and distance is not easy. Concerts featuring Brahms are well attended. Recordings of his music are abundant—a Radio 3 Building A Library feature on his third symphony in October 2008 featured 80 different versions. To many of us, the thought of a Brahms concert always lifts the spirits. Aimez-vous Brahms? Yes indeed.
But what is his music about? Trying to get a fix on it is difficult. Other composers provide clues in their lives or
their non-musical preoccupations. With Brahms, there is only the music. He demands only that we listen and learn. Yet, as the American pianist and music theorist Charles Rosen has written, Brahms's music is easy to listen to but difficult to appreciate. No composer is more personally reticent, even evasive, than Brahms. At the same time, few composers are as unflinching in confronting and surmounting musical difficulty. Brahms is rarely prolix—few composers make more out of so little—but, artistically, he never takes the easy route.
Gardiner comes at Brahms determined to make two big points that few other conductors seem concerned with. The first is to establish how learned Brahms was and to insist that this learning was integral to his compositional artistry. Both in the concert hall and in the CDs of the concerts now being issued, Gardiner achieves this by situating Brahms's well-known major works in the context of his own musical hinterland. Each concert begins with works that Brahms knew well or that shaped his own major compositions. The new disc of the first symphony, for example, contains a wonderfully austere motet by Mendelssohn that looks forward to Brahms's late great choral output.
History is an essential key to unlocking the Brahms enigma. I doubt there was ever a composer who knew more music from the past than Brahms. His prodigious personal library contained more than 2,000 scores and was stuffed with music from the 15th century onwards. All the music Brahms wrote was historically conscious too—an almost postmodern trait—and there is an entire academic industry dedicated to chiselling out his musical allusions.
Brahms's work embodies the struggle to breathe new life into old forms—not least the symphony itself, which had become an antique form in the 1850s and 1860s. But he did this by expanding the form and pushing it to new limits. The last movement of the fourth symphony is the most famous example, combining the classical developmental symphonic finale with the pre-classical rigidity of a passacaglia derived from Bach. This dialectical effort to combine the old and the new, while recognising that the process will change them both, is at the heart of Brahms. It is what makes him classical music's great liberal.
Gardiner's second big insight, though, is about performance practice. We have become used to hearing Brahms's symphonies played on modern instruments with large string sections and sometimes doubled wind parts. It is not surprising that one of the most common criticisms of Brahms's writing is therefore its thick texture. But Gardiner strips the scoring back to what Brahms himself heard when the Meiningen orchestra—just 51 players, with ten first violins, seven seconds, five violas, four cellos and four basses—gave the first performances of the fourth symphony in 1885. "Completely new, brazen individuality, it breathes unparalleled energy from A to Z," is how Hans von Bülow described the sound after rehearsing the symphony at Meiningen that autumn. And that is how it sounds again today under Gardiner.
Remembering Britten
Benjamin Britten always disliked the music of Brahms. Still, those of us who believe in the importance of collective rituals will nevertheless welcome the fact that Britten's War Requiem is increasingly regularly being performed on or around Remembrance day—an ideal moment for this potent pacifist work. This year the standout performance in this country is an all-star version in the Albert Hall on Sunday 9th November, with Royal Opera House forces conducted by Antonio Pappano. However, just as strikingly, the War Requiem is also being performed in Berlin and Hamburg that same weekend. And with happy symmetry, the Hamburg performance, which is conducted by Tobias Brommann, is taking place in the historic Protestant church of St Michaelis, in which a certain Johannes Brahms was confirmed in 1848.
