Brahms Symphony 1

We Say...

Review by Jayson Greene

You can tell immediately — immediately — what kind of Brahms interpreter you've got on your hands from how they handle opening bars of any recording of Brahms First. Those pounding drum beats are a Rorschach test, and just like the opening triplet "fate" motif of Beethoven's Fifth — how fast to play the triplets? How long does one hang onto the long held note? — they signal a lot of aesthetic choices, right away. When Marin Alsop recorded the piece with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005, she ramped up the tension as high as it would go, so the insistent pounding was like the bearing down of fate, the tribe of barbarians gathered at your gate. It announced a feverish, tensile Brahms that partook pretty seriously of the sort of meat-and-potatoes Austro-German heaviness that people normally associate with Brahms (this is one of the "three B's" we're talking about, after all). To anyone who had been wondering how Alsop, a noted interpreter of contemporary American music who hadn't distinguished herself much in the traditional repertory, would handle this Romantic-era Mt. Everest, it sent a message: "I am a force to be reckoned with."

John Eliot Gardiner, who has always displayed a knack for, er, marching to his own beat — Exhibit A would be this label, which he set up a few years before every orchestra in the world began to triumphantly announce their own imprints — takes a more restrained route. He is working with a smaller, period orchestra, for starters, and the leaner sound is startlingly refreshing, lacking the caloric bloat of Stokowski-era Brahms. The opening is still serious business: eighteen straight bars of C minor, the root C note held by the droning double basses and literally hammered home by the timpani, while the violins rise steadily against it and trace the mournful melody that will serve as the entire symphony's DNA. This is the sort of moment in the symphonic repertoire for which the adjective "stormy" was invented, and it loses no gravitas in Gardiner's capable hands. In fact, his (relatively) muted handling of the opening serves him well when the long, dark night of C returns a few minutes later, welling up more insistently and with more grief and weight.

Thus goes this entire, superlative rendering of Brahms's long-in-the-making first symphony, which he composed in furtive fits and starts under the stern tutelage of his mentor Robert Schumann. Gardiner proves a peerless architect, with the sort of eagle's-eye view of this work — it's natural peaks and valleys, its pivotal moments of drama — that suggests a lifetime of study. The sound of the recording itself is both bright and burnished, with a pleasing tone that occasionally edges into slight steeliness. Overall, this is the kind of recording one is grateful to have waited for: a thoughtful and singular take on a behemoth of the repertory.