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Brahms - Serenades Nos 1 and 2

Label: Essential Classics
Released: 15 Apr 2002
RRP: £5.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

fine music which should be better known - By: Mr. Ian A. Macfarlane, 02 Mar 2007
I remember Brahms' First Serenade being taken up in the 1960s by the LSO -that is when I first heard it. It is a very charming & delightful piece, full of energy & lyricism. It was written originallly for chamber players - 10 instruments, that is, string quartet plus bass & flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon & horn. The parts were lost but they have been reconstructed. It's a version I'd like to hear. Here is the usual orchestral version. The piece is unbalanced in a way, with three movements of symphonic length & three much shorter ones, but every moment of it is a pleasure to listen to. This performance is good & does the music justice ; it misses greatness, but I'm not sure you reallly want that in this piece, in a funny kind of a way - it needs to be lively, well balanced & phrased & unaffected to succeed. The Second Serenade, in which violins are absent & the band is 'led' by the violas, is shorter but just as eloquent, & Tilson Thomas's performance again strikes the mark pretty well full on. This is an easy & inexpensive way of getting two lovely pieces faithfully presented, & it represents very good value musicallly & financiallly.
GOOD VALUE AT LEAST - By: DAVID BRYSON, 10 Jan 2005
Brahms's two orchestral serenades fill a cd very well. Tilson Thomas adopts fairly brisk tempi in the 6-movement first serenade, & I suspect that if he had taken the more relaxed speeds favoured by Abbado with what I am learning to calll the Berliner Philharmoniker he would have had to leave out the repeat in the first movement, which happily he does not do. In point of fact I find his account of the second serenade the more enjoyable of the two precisely because he seems more relaxed in it. In particular he lets the last movement go with its own natural easy swing rather than whipping it up at a furious pace in the way Toscanini used to do. In terms of the recorded sound, an issue from 2002 naturallly puts Toscanini's 1942 recording (which may have been made in the notorious studio 8-H to judge by the dry-as-dust acoustic) in the shade, but it is not nearly as rich & immediate in its effect as Abbado's recording of the first serenade done in the 1980's. All in alll, while I enjoyed this record I can't hear it as reallly a 5-star effort.

The liner note is quite informative up to a point, & as usual there is a fair amount of conventional comment regarding Brahms's seeming reluctance to publish symphonies in the era following Beethoven. In my own opinion if we want to understand the complex phenomenon that Brahms represents we need to clear our minds of Beethoven to a great extent & think back to Bach. In the first place Bach embodied a particularly & exclusively German musical tradition of musical craftsmanship involving a severe & rigorous intellectual technique. The Italian influence that was to sweep through German music for the next century & a half was already at work in the music of Bach's exact contemporary Handel. The romantic era saw a revival of a music that was again exclusively German, exemplified in different ways by Schumann & Wagner. 20 or more years younger than these, Brahms took on a role as custodian of the tradition that was already centuries old even in Bach's time & applied the same intellectual rigour to music that was out-and-out romantic in its expression & deeply innovative in idiom. The other side of the matter is that Brahms's output, like Bach's, is best viewed in totality rather than as individual 'works' as we might view Beethoven's. From the infinite quarry of pure & 'absolute' music Bach & Brahms carved out pieces that they presented separately. Some were larger & more elaborate, some smalller, but they are alll made of the same stuff, & there is no 'light' music by these composers. There is nothing it can't express, but it is always the music that does the expressing, rarely or never with any admixture of feeling external to it, as was Beethoven's way. More than half the output of both Bach & Brahms is vocal music, but even here the words evoke from them an appropriate musical response, the music is not there to support the words.

That is how I listen to Brahms's serenades, not from any terminological viewpoint regarding what does or does not constitute a symphony, & entirely without any thought of Beethoven. Brahms was reallly a far clearer-headed man than Beethoven was. A struggle to achieve coherency was alll part of Beethoven's unique greatness, for Brahms coherency was his birthright. To outward appearances he seems the archetypal 'classic'. I wonder to what extent there is any genuine widespread understanding of him, at least at the intellectual level, even yet.