Venzago in Brahms

Going to see Mario Venzago conduct tonight in Baltimore. He is an absolutely beloved guest conductor in Baltimore who used to conduct our summer season, and if his work in Baltimore is any indication, he is honestly one of the greatest living conductors.

Sadly, he has a terrible reputation because he recorded the most iconoclastic Bruckner cycle ever done by some distance. It's pretty abysmal, but in its own way, no more awful than certain conductors who distend Bruckner out to 100 minutes. It was a terribly risky misfire from a conductor who is always searching for different ways of doing things. Sadly, it was his only major project to receive any attention, and gives absolutely no indication of his quality otherwise.

This is easily one of the most compelling recent Brahms 2's I've ever heard. It is small-scale, lithe, and modern, but at his usual best Venzago is one of those musicians who is so natural that the music aspirates with the natural breath of the very best. This is the historically informed performance that Mackerras, Harnoncourt, Norrington, and Gardiner all tried and failed to do (I'm alone in thinking that Harnoncourt easily comes closest).

Brahms forgives nothing. You have to be so born and bred to music that everything emerges with absolute naturalness. You have to polish everything to shining glow, you have to balance the orchestra or else it sounds like mud, and yet within those basic parameters, you need to let the musicians phrase with absolute freedom, and amid all that, you have to keep the pulse flowing. You can slow up, but the basic pulse can't be too slow, or else it just feels comatose.

Venzago can, as per his repuation, be terribly mannered - though sometimes to the music's benefit, as it is in his terrifically weird Schumann cycle, which amid a very quick pulse slows down to point up every weirdness in Schumann's construction, and makes you wonder if such weirdnesses are completely intentional, and a way of subverting the Beethovenian symphonic model.

But here in Brahms, this is nearly as natural as musicianship gets, nearly on the level of Kubelik, Monteux, and Busch. Yes, there's still too much rubato after the first movement, but most Brahms today is so terrible. Are there any living conductors under 90 who can play Brahms with this much glow and flow?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ZSA16xzsw