Tom Connor wrote:

>I too find something missing in Brahms Symphony performances.  I think
>the symphonies are great music, but it's something in the performances.

Bill Strother responded:

>I have similar reactions.  I prefer the previous generation of conductors
>in this music.  I remember Bruno Walter once saying, when he was accused of
>not playing new music, that Brahms was the music of HIS youth.  I do feel
>that he, and others of his generation -- Klemperer, Furtwangler, etc., have
>a freshness of discovery in their performances.  They aren't just painting
>by the numbers.

I find myself somewhere in the middle of this stream on the Brahms
symphonies.

I think Tom is right on the particular importance of idiom with
the Brahms symphonies and Bill Strothers complements on the necessity
especially in the fragile Brahms symphonies of refreshing tradition.
Bill also carries over the recommendations of the first six messages that
touched every conductor I was prepared to mention.  I am glad someone
thought to resurrect the memory of William Steinberg, whose greatness
was no less than the giants of his age and yet he is forgotten.

Brahms lacks what otherwise unites the symphonic tradition up to him and
that is the primacy of propulsion.  There is something static about the
Brahms symphonies.  Their energy level is one-tenth of Beethoven's.  And
for all that, my favorite Brahms is his most relaxed symphony and the slow
movement of that, which for me is very unusual.  I didn't begin to like
slow movements of anything until I entered my Fifties.

I am talking about the second movement of the Second played by Mengelberg.
A long time ago, the opening of that movement resonated for me with the
writing style of our Founding Fathers, particularly Jefferson.  It pushed
aside Copland's "Fanfare for a Common Man." Perhaps it has the same stride
as "The same God that gave us life gave us liberty." It is in a way Brahms'
"Meistersinger." In my mind, it quietly praises civic virtue which advances
the common weal without calling attention to itself.  It humanizes
government by associating patriotism with the farmer, the family, familiar
names and places rather than with the State and its power and formality.
The movement's rising and moderately soaring undulation reminds me that the
gift of the good society is "domestic tranquility." That ideal was soon
lost in industrialization and Manifest Destiny.  But initially it was
summed up in Washington's "Farewell Address" and his warning against
"entangling alliances."

Of the Second, I think Brahms momentarily forgot the need to keep up
the symphonic tradition laid down by Beethoven and just wrote a natural,
relaxed and lovable series of four movements.  It isn't all that different
from his two wonderful serenades.  What a wonderfully happy third movement
after our civics lesson.

Of course, this is very personal and subjective and is biographic.  But,
then, I can never listen to almost any Handel without hearing the cadence
of the King James Version of the Bible.

Andrew E. Carlan