Brahms Symphony 2

We Say...

Review by Jayson Greene

Brahms' first symphony was such a deadly serious affair that completing it nearly gave him heartburn. He composed it in agonized bursts of activity that spanned from 1854 all the way to 1876, halting at various points for prolonged bouts of existential hand-wringing over whether he would ever write a symphony to match Beethoven, his personal god. "You have no idea how it is for the likes of us to feel the tread of a giant like him behind us!" he once remarked despairingly. What he finally produced, in 1877, was a granitic slab of C-minor that has earned its spot in the orchestral repertory, but one that carried with it a whiff of self-conscious portentousness, the sound of a young man nervously proclaiming a confidence he did not yet feel in a roomful of giants. The insecurity is most detectable in the symphony's famous opening, which barges in the door with 16 straight measures of pure, hammering sturm-und-drang.

After Brahms cleared this monumental hurdle, the second symphony seemed to slip out of him almost as a gasp of relief. Compared to the first's protracted labor pains, the second symphony was completed within a year, and premiered shortly after. Where the first was agonized, the second is a warm spring breeze, burnished woodwinds glowing softly underneath sweetly yearning violins. The work it is most often compared to, in fact, is Beethoven's famous "Pastoral" Sixth Symphony, which breathes a similar air of contentment. John Eliot Gardiner, as he did with last year's recording of Brahms' first symphony, finds an appealing middle ground pitched between the leanness and brightness of "period playing" and the sumptuousness of Romantic playing, and the effervescent, lightfooted result seems to beam a shaft of sunlight through Brahms's orchestrations, highlighting all the little instrumental fillips at the edges that flesh out the work.

The album is rounded out by Brahms's gorgeous Alto Rhapsody, another work in chilly C Minor that seems a bit morose when one considers it was a wedding gift to his new bride, and some achingly songful settings of Goethe by Schubert. But the centerpiece is undoubtedly the symphony, another singular entry in Gardiner's thus-far stellar take on one of the orchestral repertoire's most well-worn cycles.