Deryk Barker wrote:

>At yesterday's Victoria Symphony concert their new Principal Guest
>Conductoir (a 27-year old called Yannick Nezet-Seguin, a name to watch)
>announced that they would be playing the second movement of Brahms 1 in
>the recently reconstructed original version and that this as far as he
>knew only the 2nd performance in N America.

Yes, there is an alternate version of the 2nd movement of the Brahms 1.
Sir Charles Mackerras recorded it as part of a HIP set of the four Brahms
symphonies "in the style of the original Meiningen performances" with
the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Robert Pascall's liner notes describe
it as follows:

   "The Initial Performing Version of the Slow Movement of the
   First Symphony"

   "All nine of the pre-publication performances of the [First]
   Symphony, given in Germany, Austria, and England in Winter
   1876 and Spring 1877, had a quite different version of the
   slow movement than the one Brahms subsequently published.
   From surviving manuscript parts for violins 1 and 2 and viola,
   and from analytical program notes for the performances in
   Cambridge and London, it is possible to reconstruct this
   earlier version."

   "The parts give us the structure of the movement, and the
   program notes provide in full a passage of five bars which
   is the only music to have disappeared completely from the
   published version, together with some further details of the
   orchestration.  The remainder of the orchestration has then
   to be deduced from the published version."

   "Brahms received his score and parts back from England at the
   beginning of May 1877, and by the end of the month he had
   finished his radical revision and sent the Symphony off to
   be printed.  The earlier version of the slow movement had a
   rondo structure (A B A C A); this he changed into the published
   ternary-form movement by deleting the central return of the
   main theme and by redistributing the first episode towards
   the peripheries of the movement (bars 9-17 and 76-90 in the
   published version).  He also restored, from an even earlier
   sketch, the divergent chromatic lines in bars 5-8.  This final
   published version is clearly both tauter and richer, for there
   is less repetition and more diversity, and Brahms has cast
   fresh light on his themes by bringing them into new relationships.
   Altogether these changes provide a deeply fascinating insight
   into genius at work."

 - seb