Beethoven: Sonatas & Concerto

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from May 30, 2014. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast158

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Today will be our last Podcast Vault post for awhile, as we prepare for a new yearly programming plan starting September 1^st. I will issue a separate blog post with more details in the coming days.

For most of the last two weeks, we’ve been sharing our Beethoven / Mozart / Scarlatti survey of piano sonatas, and many of the Beethoven posts from 2019 also paired sonatas with a piano concerto. Today’s share is one of our earliest to exploit that programming ruse, with two somatas and one concerto that had until then been provided “partially”. The sonatas are the Moonlight and Pastoral and the concerto was the Emperor concerto.

The soloists featured are popular artists on our podcasts: Wilhelm Kempff, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Vladimir Horowitz. As filler, I found this YouTube playlist of Beethoven favourites played by Horowitz, including the very same performance of the concerto…

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Sviatoslav Richter & Beethoven

  

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from March 22, 2019. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast306

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Last week, we began revisiting our survey of piano sonatas from 2019, whoch featured sonatas by Scarlatti, Mozart and of course Beethoven. At the time, we not only "filled in the holes" on the entire corpus, but also revisited some of the piano concertos.

In a programming snafu, I realized some of the montages I'd planned for this week, notably our Salieri anniversary post, were skipped in favour of some of these montages, something I plan to remedy next week...

A week or so ago I featured one of the two Stallworth pianists of the Soviet era, Emil Gilels. Today, it's Sviatoslav Richter's turn in the spotlight.  I believe Richter recorded or performed in recital all 32 of Beethoven's sonatas (I may be wrong on that...), with pressings from his homeland and live or studio recordings for Western labels. I believe the three onatas featured today are from live recitals, with the filler Andante Favori taken from a studio session in London.

Our bonus YouTube feature is another live recording, this one from28 November 1963, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus of the three final sonatas with some Brahms at the end.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

The Left Hand

 

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from August 13, 2019. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast320

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This selection from the Podcast Vault  marks Left Hander’s Day, first celebrated on 13th August 1992 as an annual event when left-handers everywhere can celebrate their sinistrality and increase public awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed. As our way of celebrating this event, I programmed three piano works meant to be played by the left hand only.

The original commentary delves into the specific works, and the injured pianists that inspired their composition.  The filler material, also features a pianist who for several years lost the use of his right hand. Leon Fleisher (1928 –2020) was a well-established soloist and recording artist when, at the age of 36, he lost the use of his right hand, due to a neurological condition that was eventually diagnosed as focal dystonia. In 1967, Fleisher commenced performing and recording the left-handed repertoire while searching for a cure for his condition. His first choice was Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.[1] In addition, he undertook conducting beginning in 1968, and became associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1973, and music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra. In the 1990s, Fleisher was able to ameliorate his focal dystonia symptoms after experimental botox injections to the point where he could play with both hands again.

The following is his 1993 Sony release “Leon Fleisher Recital”.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Brasil

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from August 9, 2019. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast319

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This week’s retro podcast is fairly recent (dating almost two years) and provides a musical travelog stop in Brazil.

The music of Brazil encompasses various regional musical styles influenced by African, American, European and Amerindian forms. Brazilian music developed some unique and original styles such as forró, repente, coco de roda, axé, sertanejo, samba, bossa nova and Brazilian versions of foreign musical styles, such as rock, soul, hip-hop, disco music, country music, ambient, industrial and psychedelic music, rap, classical music, fado, and gospel.

Samba has become the best form of Brazilian music worldwide, especially because of the country's carnival, although bossa nova, which had Antônio Carlos Jobim as one of its most acclaimed composers and performers, have received much attention abroad since the 1950s, when the song "Desafinado", interpreted by João Gilberto, was first released.

Instrumental music is also largely practiced in Brazil, with styles ranging from classical to popular and jazz influenced forms. Notable classical composers include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Gomes and Cláudio Santoro.

As is usually the case in our travelog series, we have works today from Brazilian composers (the aforementioned Jobim and Villa-Lobos) as well as Brazil-inspired compositions by Respighi, Milhaud and Constant Lambert.

As filler, I found the complete 1964 Jazz collaboration between Stan Getz and João Gilberto. Getz/Gilberto is considered the record that popularized bossa nova worldwide and was one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, selling more than 2 million copies in 1964. It was included in Rolling Stone's and Vibe's lists of best albums of all time.

I think you will (still) love this music too

Rivers

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from August 3rd, 2012. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/Rivers_483

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This past Friday, we began programming montages from our musical passport series as daily podcasts. Today’s foray into the Podcast Vault features another selection from that series, with our 2012 look at rivers.

The montage features works inspired by rivers from birth the Old and New World: rhe Rhine, the Danube, the Nile, the St-Lawrence and the Mississippi are some of the well-known rivers illustrated here. The composers vary from the Romantic all the way to the modern.

When I went looking for filler material, I started thinking of other great rivers that may have inspired other classical works and in doing so, I stumbled onto this page. Some of the works overlap  with ours, but there were some from Russian composers that are worth honourable mention, From that page, I retained Dawn on the Moscow River which opens Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera Khovanshchina. The recording feaures Shostakovich’s orchestration of the passage, performed by the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra under Evgeni Svetlanov in a vintage Meloidiya recording.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Pack your bags

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from July 6, 2012. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/PackYourBags

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This week’s selection from the Podcast Vault launches our look back at a series of montages that form what I will call our travelog series dedicated to music about places and countries we have often programmed during the summer months over the years.

Today’s montage doesn’t talk about a place but rather about a state of mind: the need to get away; for pleasure, for necessity, or for whatever reason. The triptych Escales by Jacques Ibert is indictive of the works that are part of this week’s montage, as well as a few “popular” tracks featuring the Beatles and Joe Cocker.

As filler, I chose a Canadian piece by composer Denis Gougeon simply called “A l’aventure” which, loosely translated would mean “Adventure Awaits”. Oto s a modern piece, woth all the trappings that come along with contemporary music, and conducted by Walter Boudreau, a specialist in that kind of repertoire.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Jean Sibelius – Symphonies No. 1 & 2

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from July 31, 2020. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast342

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For a second Friday, our podcast features the music of Jean Sibelius and, again, under the baton of a pair of Finnish conductors.

Born in Heinola, Finland, Jukka-Pekka Saraste began his career as a violinist before training as a conductor with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. An artist of exceptional versatility and breadth and renowned for his objective approach, he feels a special affinity with the sound and style of late Romantic music. He maintains a particularly strong connection to the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Sibelius and is internationally celebrated for his interpretations of Mahler. We remember Saraste fondly here in Canada as the Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1994 to 2001. The later years of his tenure were marked by strife over the orchestra's financial difficulties, several musicians' strikes, and his unsuccessful efforts to improve the acoustics at Roy Thomson Hall. Saraste stepped down from his Toronto post in 2001, and has since returned to Toronto for several guest appearances.

Okko Kamu was born iin Helsinki  to a family of musicians. His father played double bass in the Helsinki Philharmonic. He began violin studies at age two and entered the Sibelius Academy at age six. He formed his own string quartet, the Suhonen, in 1964 where he played first violin. At age 20, he was appointed first solo violinist at the Finnish National Opera, and held this post until 1968. He then began to conduct, initially with the Finnish National Opera orchestra. Primarily self-taught, he became principal guest conductor of the Royal Swedish Opera in 1969, the same year as he won the first Herbert von Karajan Conducting Competition in Berlin. From 1971 to 1977, Kamu was principal conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. In April 2009, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra announced the appointment of Kamu as its next chief conductor, as of the autumn of 2011 where he remained through the end of July 2016, at which time he concluded his tenure in Lahti.

As our filler piece, I chose Kamu in a live performance of the Sibelius tone poem The Wood Nymph with the Lahti Symphony.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Rachmnaninov Festival (Part 3 of 4)

  

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from August 9, 2013. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/Pcast117

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All week, our daily podcasts revisited our Rachmaninov Festival first shared during the summer of 2013. The Podcast Vault selection is the third in that four-part set, featuring the Third piano concerto and the Symphonic Dances. The two works, discussed at length in the original commentary, come at two very different times in Rachmaninov’s career – the concerto at the height of the Russian phase of his career, the other as a late (and rare) composition in the American phase.

The concerto has been featured in other shares – in addition to this “live concert” performance by Evegny Kissin, we can point to Van Cliburn in a 2017 montage discussing the concerto’s early performance as a summit meeting between Rachmaninov and Gustav Mahler, and a vinyl share last year from a Melodiya North-American issue featuring Andrei Gavrilov. The Symphonic Dances were also part of a Vinyl share in late 2017. Previn’s performance today is on point, though the vinyl performance led by Svetlanov has more “Russian bite”.

All of these performances are available in our Archive [https://archive.org/details/@itywltmt?query=rachmaninov]

As a bonus track, I chose one of Rachmaninov’s tone poems. The Rock (or The Crag) is an early composition from the summer of 1893, dedicated to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The inspiration has a few likely storylines; a couplet from a poem by Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, and a story by Anton Chekhov titled "Along the Way", in which a young girl meets an older man during a stormy, overnight stop at a roadside inn on Christmas Eve.

The YouTube clip features the Berlin Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Tcahikovsky Festival, Part Two

 

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from May 20, 2011. It can be found in our archives at   http://archive.org/details/TcahikovskyFestivalPartTwo

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This week’s selection from the Podcast Vault is the second of a three-part series from the earliest days of our blog (almost exactly 10 years ago!), featuring the historic DG 1960 all-Mravinsky stereo recordings made withthe Leninngrad Philharmonic of Tchaikovsky’s last three “numbered” symphonies. These recordings were made in London, and showcase a true Russian rendition of these most Russian symphonies. The Fifth featured today stands out as one of my favourites among the ones I have in my collection – Karajan, Rostropovich, Maazel and Guido Cantelli.

Two other works are part of this montage; Stokowski conducts the fantasy overture inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and as final track, a singe movement from the Manfred Symphony, which we recently featured in its entirety in a montage that is still on the roster of our Podcasting channel.

It still made sense to me, as filler, to provide the complete performance by Riccardo Muti and the New Philharmonia Orchestra, available as part of the complete Mutiu cycle (link here  ) and as a single continuous track:

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Musikalische Akademie der 7. Mai 1824

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from May 4, 2012. It can be found in our archives at  http://archive.org/details/MusikalischeAkademieDer7.Mai1824

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On this day in 1824 at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony. As I discussed in the original post, two more Beethoven works were also performed that night – three sections of his Missa Solemnis and an overture he wrote for a re-staging of Kotzebue’s The Ruins of Athens for the opening of Vienna's new Theater in der Josefstadt nearly two years earlier. Because the text that was used differed from the original, Beethoven wrote new music including the overture which we now know as The Consecration of the House Overture.

The Ninth symphony needs no introduction; its celebratory tone makes it a favourite at special concert events. The symphony is remarkable for several reasons; it is longer and more complex than any symphony to date and requires a larger orchestra. Beethoven’s inclusion of a chorus and vocal soloists in the final movement was a first as (presumably) nobody had done that in a symphony.

Beethoven composed more music after the Ninth, devoting his energies largely to composing his late string quartets, but no more symphonies. There are, however, symphony fragments in Beethiven’s many sketchbooks, all clearly intended for the same symphony, which would have followed the Ninth, since they appear together in several small groups, and there is consensus that Beethoven did intend to compose another symphony.

British musicologist Barry Cooper assembled the sketches into a coherent concert score first performed in 1988 by the Royal Philharmonic Society, London, to whom Beethoven himself had offered the new symphony in 1827.

As filler for today’s post, here is the combination of a lecture on the score by Dr. Cooper and a performance by the London Symphony under Wyn Morris.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Invitation to the Dance

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from June 10, 2011. It can be found in our archives at  http://archive.org/details/InvitationToTheDance

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For the past eight months, we’ve been going through all of our montages and I’m glad to revisit this quite early post from June 2011. Though I haven’t been reporting on this before, as I go through these montages I do from time to time recompile them – today’s montage had many “home digitized” tracks that I have later found properly digitized elsewhere and the resulting “revised” montage is of far better quality!

I remember that my younger daughter (fourteen at the time) was getting ready for her annual dance recital when I assembled this montage of dance favourites.

In classical music, we find dances in several forms – as pieces that exemplify specific dance styles (waltzes are a good example of that), as dance suites (such as, say, the Bach partitas), as national or folk dances and – of course – as dance numbers within larger stage works.

The selected works cover the entire spectrum, including a few “ballet selections” among which is the Sailor’s Dance from Reinholt Gliere’s 1920’s era ballet “The Red Poppy”. As our bonus piecem this week, here’s a suite of selections from the ballet performed by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra conducted by Yuri Fayer.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Digital Vinyl

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from April 29, 2011. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/DigitalVinyl

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Because we were busy last week with some Lenten/Easter programming, I didn’t bring up that on April 1^st we marked our tenth anniversary of blogs and montages on ITYWLTMT, and that in a couple of months the same will be true of our other blogging and musical sharing platforms.

This coming weekend, we will be programing our “Musical Alphabet” montages which were our first and second installments. Today’s montage, the fourth in our ongoing series which counts today well 354, was made up entirely of selections from my vinyl collection, some were even digitized using homemade techniques – which were discussed on another contemporaneous post which discussed this in more specific terms. Since those days, I have since found digital copies of most (if not all) of the tracks on today’s montage, though for nostalgia sake, I have not re-edited the montage to replace some of my original handy work!

In the original post, I make specific reference to the album Saga by pianist and “pseudo-classical” composer André Gagnon (the quote is attributable to the performer, actually). I managed to fimnd the entire album (save for one track) as a playlist on the artists’s YouTube Topic page. I luckily found the missing track and created a more complete playlist that I share today as our bonus filler.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6swnss9F7SHB-WoR6y8w817uznoAM7gA

I think you will (still) love this music too!

The Symphonic Organ – Orchestra Edition

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from March 31, 2020. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast335

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Today’s Friday share is the second of three in a row featuring works for organ and orchestra, following yesterday’s trio of twentieth century works, today’s selections are also fairly modern, with Widor;s symphony no. 3 for organ and orchestra acting as the lone 19^th century work on the docket.

The montage and commentary are barely a year old, so I will defer to that post for details on the three works featured today and instead spend a paragraph on the filler – a Handel organ concerto from a broadcast performance featuring Karl Richter as both soloist and conductor.

As I once discussed, Handel more or less invented the organ concerto as program filler for his many operas and oratorios. As such, it is not uncommon for the works to provide opportunities for organ “ad libium”. Richter viewed Baroque music as fundamentally impromptu, and believed that no work from that era should be performed the same way twice. His performances were known for their soul-searching, intense, and festive manner. While his interpretations may have been overshadowed by the historically informed performance practice movement, there is still much to be said about them. He recorded most of the Handel concertos for Decca with his own Chamber Orchestra in the late 1950’s; the videos available on YouTube date from the early 1970s. The work I kept for today is a complete performance of the Organ Concerto-Op.7, No.1.

 

I think you will (still) love this music too.

 

Birds

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from March 16, 2012. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/Birds_63

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This week’s throwback montage dates back to our first Spring on the blog and is a set of works inspired by birds: larks, magpies, swallows, swans, nightingales, hens, seagulls and a piano suite dedicated to song birds by composer and amateur ornithologist, Olivier Messiaen.

As I often point out when we revisit old montages, I’m always pleasantly surprised how the original post does a good job setting up the montage, and I’ll simply refer you to the above link to read it. The post also included a filler – a complete performance of the entire Respighi suite Gli Ucelli in a vintage performance by the Chicago Symphony.

If you dare venture into the original “bilingual” section (in French), I inserted a concert performance of this week’s bonus track, Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques, a work from the mid-1950’s originally commissioned by Pierre Boulez and meant to feature Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod, as soloist.

The birds that inspired Messiaen in this piece are: the gracula of India, the golden-fronted verdin, the Baltimore Trouble, the greater prairie chicken, the prairie northern mockingbird, the cat bird, the Indian shama, the white-crested laughingthrush, the migratory blackbird, entrusted to the two clarinets, the swainson, the thrush hermit, the red-whiskered bulbul and the wood thrush.

The YouTube clip features Philippe Entremont as soloist, and the Cleveland Orchestra under Boulez’s direction.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Mendelssohn & Mahler Symphonies no. 4

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from May 16, 2014. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast156

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All of this week on our podcasting channel, we surveyed Mendelssohn’s mature symphonies and today’s montage features his “Italian” Symphony (his #4), in a pairing with another fourth symphony from a composer/conductor, Gustav Mahler.

As the original post does a good job at introducing both, I thought I would spend some time discussing my “search” for another fourth symphony as my usual filler. I wanted to find anither symphony by a composer whose last name starts with “M”, avoiding Mozart’s fourth which (as many of his very early symphonies) is both short and of doubtful origin…

If you survey “fourth symphonies” you’ll hit all the usual suspects – Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Vaughan-Williams and even symphonies by less travelled composers like Lutosławski and the work I retained by American composer David Maslanka.

In the last two decades of the Twentieth Century, the wind band music of David Maslanka has become well known and widely performed. The roots of his Symphony No. 4 are many. The central driving force is the spontaneous rise of the impulse to shout for the joy of life. The hymn tune Old Hundred, several other hymn tunes (the Bach chorales Only Trust in God to Guide You and Christ Who Makes Us Holy), and original melodies which are hymn-like in nature, form the backbone of Symphony No. 4.

The performance I retained is by the Eastman Wind Ensemble

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Two of a Kind

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 24, 2012. It can be found in our archives at  http://archive.org/details/TwoOfAKind

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Today’s selection from the Podcast Vault takes us back to February 2012 – and our #3 Obsession – with “pairs” of works. Many of the examples are indeed limited to two, but as I pointed out in the original commentary, some of the pairs are extracted from later corpuses – such as  the first two marches for orchestra by Canadian composer Murray Adaskin - the complete set has three marches… Then, there are two of Lauro’s eight “Valses Venezolanos” for solo guitar.

As filler this week, here are all eight performed by Carlos Alberto Castro

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Viktoria Postnikova & Tchaikovsky

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 22, 2019. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast304

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This week’s visit to the Podcast Valut takes us back nearly two years, with a montage of Tchaikovsky’s music for piano solo, featuring his two piano sonatas from 1865 and 1878.

Our performer, Viktoria Postnikova, was a prizewinner at the 1965 Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, and she captured second prize at the 1966 Leeds Competition. In 1969 she married famed conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and the following year won third prize at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Postnikova has recorded the complete piano music of Tchaikovsky, Janáček, and Glinka for Erato records. She brings to every single piece a virtually ideal blend of affection, respect and intelligence, not to speak of virtuoso command. Not only does this give the textures the best possible chance to 'come off the page', she also has the instinct for inflexions which get us to the heart of Tchaikovsky's individual moods.

As our bonus track, from the same Erato collection by Viktoria Postnikova is The Potpourri on themes from Tchaikovsky's first opera The Voyevoda (TH 128), arranged by the composer himself in 1868, but published under a pseudonym.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

A Second or Two

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 1, 2013. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/Pcast090

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For a third week un a row, our daily podcasts exploited past thematic arcs to inform our posts, and this week we relied on two similar arcs – “Terrible Twos” (from 2012) and “My Number Two Obsession” from 2013. Today’s Podcast Vault selection comes from the 2013 set featuring “second works”, or "number twos" from Bach to Buczynski. The original post discusses the individual works in good detail, so I have nothing much to add.

Featured are a couple of "second rhapsodies". Both Debussy and Gershwin had their "first rhapsodies" featured in past montages. To keep the theme going, as filler, I thought I would share Béla Bartók’s second rhapsody for violin and piano. Rhapsody No. 2 was subsequently arranged with orchestra accompaniment - composed in 1928 and orchestrated in 1929. The orchestral version was revised in 1935, and the version with piano in 1945. It is dedicated to Hungarian violinist Zoltán Székely, who later became the first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet in 1937, two years after the founding of the ensemble.

The performance here is if the version for violin and orchestra – Isaac Stern is soloist, Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic.

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Frédéric

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 14, 2014. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast143

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For the last three days, we shared past podcasts featuring works for piano and orchestra by Chopin. Today’s podcast vault selection is an all-Chopin montage, whose title comes from the classic song by Claude Léveillée – which closes the montage. The bulk of the montage contents were extracted from two albums.

Thomas May asked in a review “How can it be that a recording by one of today's indisputably unequaled pianists performing some of her prime repertory--made fresh within months of her triumph in the 1965 Warsaw International Chopin Competition--could languish for decades in the vaults before its official release?” Known as ”The Legendary 1965 Recording”, this rare performance sat in limbo for years for contractual reasons. To everyone’s delight it was finally released on CD in 1999, and to this day is still hot to the touch.

This is a unique piece of musical history. Much of the session done in one take including the demanding final movement of the the B- Sonata. Masterful performances full of raw energy from beginning to end define this CD and help dispell the myth that Chopin’s piano music is wistful and serves only as frilly background music.

The remaining Chopin tracks are from Vladimir Horowitz’s “Last Recording”, for Sony Classical, completed four days before his death and consisting of repertoire he had never previously recorded – including some of these Chopin gems. Horowitz had an autumnal last period in which he was constantly looking at new literature and playing it in a relaxed, charming manner. Gone were the neuroticism and outsize dynamics that could surge into his playing. In this kind of performance he gives the feeling that now he is no longer out to prove anything, that he is merely having a good time playing the piano.

As bonus tracks, here’s a YouTube playlist featuring the entire album.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PHeC5f0TTctagwkme3VIv7TULYKVo6J

I think you will (still) love this music too.

Brahms Symphony no. 4

  

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from January 25, 2013. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/BrahmsFestivalPart4

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Throughout the week, I programmed our Brahms Cycle podcasts from January 2013 in sequence, culminating today with a Podcast Vault share featuring Brahms’ Symphony no. 4.

In his Classical Net review of Eugen Jochum’s Brahms cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic reissued on CD, Brian Wingman makes an audacious claim, given the high standard the Berlin orchestra has maintained in the German repertoire under luminaries like Furtwangler, Karajan, Abbado and even more recently Simon Rattle: this is the finest Brahms cycle to ever come out of Berlin. More than simply having the Berlin Philharmonic sounding splendid for 1952, Jochum is also able to bring out enormous amounts of detail through his careful attention to the winds and brass - freewheeling, but always musical.

Ignoring monophonic recordings is a dangerous gamble that causes you to miss out on exceptionally great musicianship. Jochum was nothing if not a great musician, and his Brahms recordings happily stand the test of time. Jochum did record these pieces later in stereo, with the London Philharmonic on EMI. Those readings (available on YouTube here) are wonderful, and the best Brahms with that particular ensemble.

Completing the original montage, a lively interpretation  of Brahms’ Serenade no. 1 by Raffi Armenian and his then orchestra in Kitchener-Waterloo.

As our bonus share, another recording by Jochuim and a London orchestra (this time, the LSO) in Brahms’ Haydn Variations (we heard the two-piano version this past Tuesday), coupled with Elgar’s Enigma Variations

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B_RNobM-BQl3M_QPc1rIU4gMv8vSkhV

I think you will (still) love this music too.