THE Brahms 4

This got away from me. Apologies in advance.....

So... THE Brahms 4.... There are a number of great ones, Busch and Beinum obviously among them IMHO, not to mention Munch/Boston, Kubelik/Wien, Ansermet/Suisse Romande. Klemperer certainly deserves mention if you can take the way he lumbers through the Scherzo - and I love it. There are two extraordinary broadcasts in not great sound from Monteux/Boston and Kletzki/Lucerne Festival, and the very young Celibidache in Berlin that sadly'screws the pooch' by turning Andante into a Lento. If you prefer a more overtly romantic or classical Brahms 4 there are a lot of other options.... For romantics I'd particularly recommend either Jochum recording over Furtwangler. Furtwangler is out for titanic drama, Jochum is out for luminous lyricism. And for classical readings I'd particularly take Sawallisch's Wiener Symphoniker and Colin Davis in Dresden, both are perhaps a little too metronomic, but fundamentally they understand this masterpiece in a way that, say, Toscanini does not. For something almost Mozartian, I'd also recommend Felix Weingartner's 1930s London Philharmonic recording. And if you really think Kleiber is without peer... listen to his live Berlin Philharmonic performance, it's exciting and nuanced enough to blow his official releases out of the water. But there is one performance that at this point strikes me as in just a league of its own.

To me, there are four ways to play Brahms. Two of them are wrong. One is to play him like Mendelssohn, the other is to play him like Wagner. You know Mendelssohnian Brahms when you hear it. It's the way Toscanini and Szell streamline every detail into a Beethovenian suitcase from which Brahms's potbelly sounds painfully distended. The tensile clarity that is exhilarating in Beethoven makes Brahms sound downright ugly. You equally know Wagnerized Brahms, the thick fog of strings in which obscures everything else, whirlpool accelerandi and ritardandi... This is the Brahms of Furtwangler and Bernstein and their various ilks, and it has its virtues, but except perhaps in the 1st symphony, it's simply not Brahms. And then you have Karajan's Brahms which manages the singular accomplishment of combining the worst of both approaches.

But then there are two ways, one broad and one fast, that really capture what he was. One is probably slower than Brahms meant his music to be, but it ultimately doesn't matter. It's the broad, glowing, affectionate Brahms of Giulini-like musicians who make Brahms glow like an organ. Ivan Fischer and Semyon Bychkov do it today, Mariss Jansons did too. Go further back you find that kind of Brahms from a bunch of great names soon to turn 100, and it probably goes all the way back to Hans Richter.

But then there's Brahms as he saw himself. I have to imagine he at once saw his music as much more and much less serious than people imagine it. On the one hand, he would be incensed with Wagnerian melodrama, which he'd find artificial. On the other, he would have little truck with people who try to play the score exactly as written, particularly because musicians who claim to reprint in sound what's on the page rarely do.... He would have wanted performances like his music, that pick and choose the best elements from both classicism and romanticism and utilize the means of his own day to capture the spirit of former eras.

Brahms deserves to be taken seriously enough to have his own style, and also to be taken less seriously. Everything in Brahms is irony and ambiguity. The emotions of his music always have quotations and question marks, and he maps out a precise emotional terrain of the transitions between emotions. He is deliberately not trying to make a major musical statement, because he's doing something far more sophisticated, and far closer to what makes humans human.

Classical music lovers brandish our music's seriousness like a trophy, and shoehorn a lot of music into being much loftier than it is. What makes the tragedy of Brahms 4 so devastating is that he couches it in the language of Johann Strauss. Remember, as he was writing it Brahms joking wrote to Max Kalbeck that he was just stringing together 'a few waltzes and polkas.' The first movement is marked Allegro non Troppo, not Troppo Andante. It's a polka, a sad polka. The wind accompaniment to the melody should sound like an organ grinder, and the second subject has to move enough to sound as though you can dance to it.

Think of the main harmonic scheme of the movement: down thirds, mostly minor: B-G-E-C-A-F#-D#-B, and then back up thirds, mostly minor, C-E-G-B-D-F-A-C... what a perfect metaphor for a stultifying routine. The opening is a spiritless dance, and let's face it, is there any dance in the world more annoying than a polka?...

And yet it's not just dance. The first four notes, B-G-E-C, are the four notes that begin the third of the Vier Ernste Gesangen, 'O Tod, O Tod,' 'Oh death, how bitter are you.' There are so many moments in the first movement that sound as though the hero has stopped dancing, sleeping and dreaming, and at one point it sounds as though he's taking his final nap. This movement is a dance of death. It has to be played at a basic tempo of a dance, then the tempo has to lurch back in quiet moments like a person who is exhausted of dancing.

The second movement is not dissimilar to a sarabande, complete with modal harmonies and a guitar accompaniment in the strings. It too is usually played too slowly, this is the 'waltz' of which Brahms spoke, and it is so clearly love music. It doesn't have to flow at the speed of the Blau Donau, but it does have to move in the same way that one might dance with a spouse. And like a spouse, the harmony is ambiguous, and there is great turbulence along the way, but the final chorale of the Andante is a major key declaration of faith, faith that we still believe in the people we love.

One could just as easily ascribe specious extra-musical programs to the last two movements. The third movement being false joy that eventually becomes at least a moment of real joy. And perhaps the final movement is as much a dance unto death as the end of Le Sacre du Printemps. But the point is, Brahms 4, like Beethoven 7, is the apotheosis of the dance, but Brahms's dances are the opposite of Beethoven's. Brahms is mapping the terrain of appearances, false joy, hollow celebration, secret broken hearts, a world that demands everything of us so long as we are part of the world. I can't help wondering if through the entire symphony, Brahms wasn't thinking of Rigoletto right before the 'Cortigiani' monologue, it's even the same key in which Rigoletto sings his falsely joyful 'Ladaaaa ladaaa ladaa....'

So who captures this world of 'going through the motions' best of all? To me, the answer is so clearly Gunter Wand. I don't care much for Wand's Bruckner, and I used to be bothered by the way Wand would increase the tempo of the first movement's second subject, but he gives us all the songful beauty of Giulini and Jansons, but at much more danceable tempi. Like so much of Mozart and Schubert, so much of Brahms is about the ambiguity of the world between joy and suffering; how we process both simultaneously, how we have to act as though we're feeling one when we feel the other. Brahms is not as serious as more obviously dramatic masters - he's not Dostoevsky, he's not Caravaggio. The world of Brahms is the world of Chekhov and Rembrandt, where we process many emotions all at once. To me, that's a much more serious and adult way of experiencing art. It expresses what it's like to be human rather than be a god, and gives us a consolation which larger than life masterpieces sometimes can't provide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62re4C2PSCU