Luogo e data di registrazione		Clara Wieck Auditorium, Sandhausen (Germania) - 15-20 aprile 1996
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Günter Appenheimer, Tonstudio van Geest
	Editor		Lily Nagosa
	Cover		Pasture Land by Friedrich Gauermann (1807-1862) (Bridgeman Art Library)
	Edizione CD		NAXOS | 8.554822 | (1 CD) | durata 1h 18' 35" | (p) & (c) 2002 | DDD
	Note		-

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833, the son of a double bass player and his much older wife, a seamstress. His childhood was spent in relative poverty and his early studies in music, as a pianist rather than as a string player, developed his talent to such an extent that there was talk of touring as a prodigy at the age of eleven. It was Eduard Marxsen who gave him a grounding in the technical basis of composition while the boy found an outlet for his talents by playing the piano in summer inns outside the city. In 1851 Brahms met the émigré Hungarian violinist Reményi who introduced him to Hungarian dance music that had a later influence on his work. Two years later he set out in his company on his first concert tour, their journey taking them, on the recommendation of the Hungarian violinist Joachim, to Weimar where Franz Liszt held court and might have been expected to show particular favour to a fellow countryman. Reményi profited from the visit, but Brahms, with a lack of tact that was later accentuated, failed to impress the master. Later in the year, however, he met the Schumanns through Joachim’s agency. The meeting was a fruitful one. In 1850 Schumann had taken up the offer from the previous incumbent, Ferdinand Hiller, of the position of municipal director of music in Düsseldorf, the first official appointment of his career and the last. Now in the music of Brahms he detected a promise of greatness and published his views in the journal he had once edited, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, declaring Brahms the long awaited successor to Beethoven. In the following year Schumann, who had long suffered from intermittent periods of intense depression, attempted suicide. His final years, until his death in 1856, were to be spent in an asylum while Brahms rallied to the support of Schumann’s wife, the gifted pianist Clara Schumann and her young family, remaining a firm friend until her death in 1896, shortly before his own in the following year. Brahms had always hoped that sooner or later he would be able to return in triumph to a position of distinction in the musical life of Hamburg. This ambition was never fulfilled. Instead he settled in Vienna, intermittently from 1863 and definitively in 1869, establishing himself there and seeming to many to fulfil Schumann’s early prophecy. In him his supporters, including above all, the distinguished critic and writer Eduard Hanslick, saw a true successor to Beethoven and a champion of music untrammelled by extra musical associations, of pure music as opposed to the Music of the Future promoted by Wagner and Liszt, a path to which Joachim and Brahms both later publicly expressed their opposition. The first of Brahms’ symphonies was slow in gestation. Overawed by the example of Beethoven and the manifold expectations of his friends and unresponsive to their anxious queries, he eventually completed his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 in the summer of 1876. He was still busy with the fourhand piano arrangement of the first symphony when in the summer of 1877, he started work on his Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73 while staying for the first time at Pörtschach on the Wörthersee, completing it at Lichtental in the autumn. The first performance was given in Vienna on 30 December, followed in 1878 by publication, after the necessary corrections of the score and the four-hand piano version during a second summer at Pörtschach. Brahms had teased Clara Schumann and other friends by stressing the tragic nature of the new symphony which was in fact, among the most cheerful of his compositions. The pastoral serenity of the idyllic first movement is captured in the composer’s four-hand arrangement, the magical effect of the second subject with cellos taking the upper part above the violas, captured by the second piano while the first piano plays the upper violin parts, sempre dolce. The relatively dense orchestral textures are transformed to present the work in the greatest clarity with its motivic reliance on the opening figure of the movement. The B major second movement allows the first piano the contrary motion of cellos and bassoons in the opening thematic material, clarifying the element of counterpoint. The third movement, a combination of rondo, variations and scherzo, again appears in its clearest form, to be followed by the final Allegro con spirito in the first subject of which both instruments join while the second subject of the sonata-form movement is entrusted first to the second piano. In the summer of 1883 Brahms took rooms in the spa town of Wiesbaden perhaps to be near the young singer Hermine Spies, his Hermione without an ‘o’ whose musical abilities served as inspiration for his Op. 96 and Op. 97 songs. Symphony No. 3 in F major described by a contemporary as Brahms’ Op. 90 ‘Eroica’, after the preceding ‘Pastoral’, was first performed in Vienna on 2 December. In the four-hand piano version it is the second piano that introduces the opening wind chords, before the first piano adds the impressive descending theme with its nod to Robert Schumann and characteristic mixture of major and minor. The clarinet A major second subject is entrusted to the first piano, a pastoral contrast to the grandeur of the first theme. The forceful conclusion of the exposition is followed by the full chords that open the central development. The clarinet and bassoon opening of the C major Andante is offered by the first piano, as the second adds the brief interjections by the strings and the clarinet and bassoon second subject is also entrusted to the first piano. Similarly the cello theme that starts the C minor third movement is heard at the outset from the first piano with its viola accompaniment while the second weaves the cross rhythm of the violins, a world away from the traditional scherzo. It is the second piano that takes up the principal theme on its return in the French horn after the trio section with its syncopated accompaniment. The last movement opens sotto voce and in unison, before the first piano takes up the chordal treatment of the theme by the woodwind. The second subject of this imposing sonataform movement translates the repeated note triplets of second violins and violas into acceptable piano idiom with characteristic cross rhythms. The symphony ends with none of the defiance of Beethoven, but rather with gently suggested memories of the motif that started the whole work concluding a work that the contemporary critic Eduard Hanslick found artistically the most perfect of the first three Brahms symphonies. Keith Anderson