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Wed, 29 Oct 2003 07:03:23 -0500 |
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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
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