Brahms Cycle I Johannes BrahmsSymphony no. 1 in C minor op. 68 Johannes BrahmsSymphony no. 2 in D major op. 73 Conductor Daniel Harding
Brahms-Cycle with Maestro Daniel Harding – Part I
Johannes Brahms and the musicians of the MCO share a very central point of interest: chamber music. Brahms the pianist was a passionate chamber musician, and this genre occupies a large part of his work as a composer. But that is not all: at their core, Brahms’ orchestral pieces are also chamber music. Nothing is incidental, nothing dispensible. Every individual voice counts, and the themes and motives are most intimately interwoven. Likewise with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, whose very name affirms this. Each member of the MCO lives the chamber music style of playing – listening to and reacting to one another, taking responsibility and bringing their own creativity into play – even when great symphonies are on the program.
With this background, it is self-evident that the MCO would be as comfortable with the Brahms Symphonies as it is, and would perform these works so often and so successfully. Now however, for the first time in the MCO’s history and under the baton of principle conductor Daniel Harding, the orchestra will play all four Brahms Symphonies as a cycle.
It’s an exciting project, since the four Brahms Symphonies together constitute a cohesive and unified whole in a way that one seldom sees in classical music. An overview of all four in order shows them, on a grand scale, to correspond to the four movements of a single symphony. Their world premieres occurred within a time period of nine years, such that Symphonies No. 1 and 2 (1876 and 1877 respectively) and Symphonies No. 3 and 4 (1883 and 1885) each formed a pair. The performance cycle of the MCO corresponds to this coupling: Symphonies No. 1 and 2 will be performed on Oct. 7, in the context of the MCO’s Residency NRW, in the Philharmonic Hall of Essen and repeated in Frankfurt on Oct. 10. Symphonies No. 3 and 4 will follow a good half year later, on May 21, 2011, again in Essen.
The MCO plays Brahms’ Symphonies in the composer’s standard arrangement for strings, that is, a somewhat smaller instrumentation than usual, so that the works’ essence as chamber music might be accentuated and individual lines might be heard more clearly. Symphonies No. 1 and 2 „I will never compose a symphony! You have no notion of how it discourages me, whenever I here this giant marching behind me“, complained Brahms in a letter to his friend, the conductor Hermann Levi. The composer, acutely self-critical, found the nine symphonies of Beethoven to be an overwhelming model. Only in his forty-third year did Brahms succeed – after many aborted attempts and almost fifteen years of work – in finishing his first symphony. It is indeed stamped with Beethoven’s influence, or rather, with the mark of Brahms’ conflicted position on Beethoven. Not only does this appear in the the orchestral instrumentation, in the chronological dimensions, and in the choice of one of Beethoven’s most oft-used keys, C-Minor, but also in thematic allusions. As in Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony (No. 5), Brahms’ First Symphony follows the idea, „From darkness into the light.“ The world premiere in Karlsruhe was a success, and only a few weeks later the work was being celebrated in Vienna. In just another year came the second symphony, in D-Major. The key elements in this symphony are folk sounds and pastorale, and its first performance was one of the greatest triumphs in the composer’s career. Brahms himself made a note of it: „The orchestra rehearsed, played, and praised me with a voluptuousness as has never happened to me before.“
