Stephen Heersink has tried the following recordings:

>>Jochum DG
>>Jochum EMI
>>Karajan DG
>>Walter Sony
>>Kleiber DG
>>Wand RCA
>>Swallisch Philips
>>
>>and I still don't like Brahms' symphonies.

Eric Kisch responds:

>Then why bother?  If that group of interpreters doesn't do it for you,
>I'd go to another composer.  You seem to have given JB a fair try.  De
>gustibus.  However, you might try another hearing as a 50th birthday
>present to yourself.  Views and perspectives change, and Brahms starts
>to make more sense after a while.

For the longest time, I too disliked Brahms, especially the symphonies.
If I encountered one on a program, I would, despite a good effort, fall
asleep during the middle movements (sometimes during the opening movement,
No. 2), and usually wake up for the finale.  It bored me.  I couldn't get
what people saw in what seemed to me unimaginative, even corny turns of
phrase.  It had all the charm of a Victorian horsehair sofa, without a
saving oddity.  I was at least in good company - George Bernard Shaw and
Benjamin Britten disliked Brahms's work as well (Shaw later magnanimously
admitted that this was the only mistake he had made as a music critic).
I did like the choral motets, the double concerto, the Haydn Variations,
the Vier ernste Gesaenge, and the first piano concerto, but that was about
it - in other words, mainly the Sturm und Drang stuff.  Then as I began to
grow old, I had a revelation (of a technical nature; not worth specifying)
about a minor work and this led to a!  n emotional epiphany.  Either that,
or I was at the right stage in my life to listen.

This seems to me important.  Our perceptions of composers change over
the years, simply because we (at least I hope so) change.  Mozart and
Schubert are the two who probably fade in and out for me the most (right
now, I get them; just came out the other side of a Schubert quartet binge).
Tchaikovsky was my favorite composer when I was a child.  I sniggered at
him in adolescence and as a young adult.  I now think him one of the most
important and innovative composers of the 19th century - the first to
solve the problem of the Romantic song-symphony - and, more important, I
love his work with my earliest enthusiasm.  When I was in college, I used
to complain to my professors about how simple-minded Wordsworth's poety
seemed to me - and, yes, I could produce exigesis with the best of them.
It wasn't a matter of not knowing what was going on.  It was a matter of
not caring.  One of my best profs finally said to me, "Wait until you're
fifty." It took me almost, but not quite tha!  t long.  This is why I keep
going back every once in a while to music which hasn't done much for me.
Lightning may strike again.

Steve Schwartz