[ADAM: THERE'S AUDIO AND ALSO THE CONCERT DATE/PROGRAM DON'T MATCH UP WITH COLUMBUS SYMPHONY CALENDAR http://www.columbussymphony.com/calendar/20092010-season] The Columbus Symphony performs Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Brahms Symphony 1 and Haydn's overture to L'isola disabitata Saturday November 6 at 8 pm and Sunday the 7th at 3 in the Ohio Theatre. Jean-Marie Zeitouni conducts. Charles Wetherbee is the violin soloist. It's interesting to think of the music composers were listening to as they prepared their own works. Brahms in the early years of his career was primarily a pianist and a conductor. His work in composition was careful and methodical. He took his time and wasn't afraid to keep trying until he got it right. His years as a conductor of choral societies and later at Vienna's prestigious singakademie exposed him to Mozart and Haydn, probably a little Bach, maybe some Palestrina. Mendelssohn died when Brahms was thirteen and Mendelssohn's music had been captivating the German and English speaking worlds for many years (Queen Victoria adored Mendelssohn, the music and the man). The two composers were important in different way. Brahms for his expansion of the orchestra and for the development of 'pure' music, as opposed to Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk encompassing "all art": music, drama, movement. Brahms wasn't impressed by the babbling brook. He wanted the orchestra to sing. Cantabile-singing is what gives music 'flow'. I used to think Brahms didn't flow. Make no mistake, Brahms moves me as few composers do. The Requiem has me in tears. If you listen to no other lieder, know and love Schubert's Die schoene Muellerin and Brahms Feldeinsamkeit, Wie melodien zieht es mir and Von ewiger liebe. The four symphonies are a wonderful opportunity to hear the romantic era orchestra at its apex, a generation before Mahler broke it open. But Brahms was not much concerned with charm or the flowing sense that one theme moves gracefully and beguilingly to the other. Brahms likes the audience to work. I've enjoyed listening to recorded performances of the symphonies with Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Mackerras attempts to recreate Brahms's own performances of his symphonies with ther Meinnigen Court Orchestra 130 years ago. Fewer strings were used than we are accustomed to today. Brahms sat the first and second violins on opposite sides of the podium. Musicologist Robert Pascall notes "The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra had forty-four players in 1839 (strings  9,8, 5, 5, 4) seventy-two players in 1881 (strings 12, 10, 8, 8, 6) and ninety -eight players in 1890 (strings 20, 20, 13, 10, 10)....the Vienna Philharmonic had 114 players in 1910, with personnel for doubling the woodwinds parts when desired....Brahms himself conducted a festival performance of the Second symphony in Hamburg in 1878 with...113 players (strings 24, 22, 16, 14, 10 and one woodwind player per part). But when he had a choice he preferred smaller orchestras where the strings would not dominate the woodwinds so much.(Italics mine) In 1880 Brahms went to the duchy of Meinnigen , home to a fine court orchestra of forty-nine players. For several years this became the preferred ensemble for his works. Its instructive to hear the reduced (to us, in 2010) forces with leather topped tympani, gut strings and valveless horns. Here's Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening moments of the first symphony.... [audio:MACBRAHMS1.mp3] Here's the same music with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan... [audio:KARBRAHMS1.mp3] Karajan is closer to a cantabile ideal, but compared to Mackerras he sounds over inflated. It's very grand and very exciting, and it is the way all of us of a certain age heard Brahms growing up. But I find the insistent drum beats to have more meaning in the Mackerras performance. Ironically, the lighter tone and smaller forces seem more threatening and more anxious. Mackerras's forces used more stops and less legato. The ride could be bumpier but the music gains in emotion and excitement. There's a difference between a large orchestra playing softly and a small orchestra playing loudly. Aside from the obiovus the effort of a small orchestra playing gut strings with no virbrato and valveless horns makes the physical effort of playing much greater. This effects timbre and dynamics. We think this was the kind of playing Brahms preferred. For tempi, the engine driving the music, Pascall quotes the pianist Fanny Davis, "who frequently heard Brahms play in his later years, one felt the fundamental rhythms underlying surface rhythms...he would not linger on one note alone, but on a whole idea, as if unable to tear himself away from its beauty. He would prefer to lengthen a bar or a phrase rather than split it by making up the time into a metronomic bar...this expansive elasticity...was one of the chief characteristics of Brahms's interpretation. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick supported Brahms in print and was largely responsible for the composer's international good press: "It has been said of Beethoven's music that one his chief characteristics is an ethical element that would rather convince than charm...Brahms seems to favor too one-sidedly the great and serious, the difficult and complex at the expense of sensuous beauty." Maybe. But what finale is more moving, more unexpected than this? [audio:MACBRAHMS4A.mp3] Brahms didn't lack charm but it wasn't paramount to her. Mendelssohn had charm and wit and elegance. They were the central forces of his music. Here's a bit from A Midsummer Night's Dream, written when Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)was seventeen: [audio:MIDSUMMER.mp3] Charm came easily to Mendelssohn and so did cantabile. Here's a bit of the second movement of the violin concerto [audio:MENDEL_MVT2.mp3] Mendelssohn's elegance and sense of line went to the listener's heart. Brahms magisterial skill encompassed rhythm, pitch and volume into an orchestra rapidly changing in size and configuration during his lifetime. With small or large forces, Brahms is a composer who repays repeated listening, with always something previously missed and gratefully new to hear.
Columbus Symphony: Brahms, Mendelssohn and Haydn
