Gramophone Collection: Brahms Symphony No.3 by Richard Osborne

[Oscar]

Oddly, James Levine's excellent 1994 recording w/ VPO is not listed in the 'select' discography. One of my fave 'modern' versions.

From gramophone.co.uk http://tinyurl.com/l9sddg8

<< Brahms Symphony No 3: which recording is best?
Richard Osborne surveys the finest recordings of the Third Symphony

Tuesday, January 28, 2014
(This article originally appeared in Gramophone, April 2012)

'It is enormously rewarding - one of the world's grandest bracers. What a lift in those themes, and what tenderness beneath their power! Brahms for ever!'

So wrote WR Anderson in Gramophone in September 1935 at the end of a survey during which he had struggled to decide whether Leopold Stokowski or Willem Mengelberg had his vote in Brahms's Third Symphony. Had Clemens Krauss's superb 1930 Vienna Philharmonic HMV recording been available, WRA might have worried less. It is none the less remarkable how well this most elusive of great 19th-century symphonies was served in the early years of electronic recording.

The Third is the most personal of Brahms's four symphonies, and the shortest. It is a glorious work, yet a deeply troubled one. And there is the added peculiarity of its being, unusually for its genre and age, a symphony in which all four movements end quietly.

Brahms was 50 and at the zenith of his art when he completed it in 1883. He remained resolutely silent as to the work's inner content yet the music itself provides clues. The great summons at the opening rests on the notes F-A-F ('Frei aber froh', 'Free but happy'), a cipher Brahms had used in response to his friend Joseph Joachim's motto F-A-E ('Frei aber einsam', 'Free but lonely') in that halcyon age in Düsseldorf in the early 1850s when the young Brahms was taken under the wing of Robert and Clara Schumann. It can be no coincidence that there is a clear echo of Schumann's own Third Symphony, the Rhenish, in the passionate down-sweep of the strings in bar three of the Brahms. Were Schumann and his troubled end a cue for this great outpouring?

Brahms's use of the F-A-F cipher is itself ambiguous. The 'A' in bar two is an A flat, tipping the work instantly towards the minor key, with a sinister tritone adding to the sense of angst. And what of the later transformation of the exposition's gracious dance into a nightmare waltz, or the crisis-laden mood of much of the work's finale? Time and again during this symphony, WB Yeats's words come to mind: 'For Nature's pulled her tragic buskin on/And all the rant's a mirror of my mood.'

Too multifaceted to be known from a single interpretation, the Third Symphony can be played classically or romantically, briskly or with great breadth. Brahms himself was not prescriptive when it came to such matters. Tempo modification fascinated him to the point of obsession, but he knew that speed itself is relative. Metronome marks were anathema to him ('I have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together'), and he mistrusted musicians who put their faith in them.

FIRST RECORDINGS

The earliest extant recording of the Third Symphony was made in 1928 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is finely played without undue resort to saturated string tone. The principal drawback is an over-inflated account of the troubled pastorale which is the work's Andante. At a little over 10 minutes, Stokowski's performance of this movement is not quite as protracted as his 1959 Houston version, but it remains out of scale with the work as a whole. The 1932 Willem Mengelberg recording is a somewhat portentous affair. The first movement, complete with its exposition repeat, is positively Gladstonian and the two inner movements are much pulled about. Neither of these versions compares well with the 37-year-old Clemens Krauss's 1930 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, which remains one of the truest of all accounts of the symphony on record. It is a beautifully articulated performance, strongly drawn yet rhythmically crisp, with a slow movement that is every bit as expressive as Stokowski's but better paced. Sergey Koussevitzky's 1945 Boston recording (RCA, 7/74R) has similar qualities to Krauss's, though there is a fearful solecism in bar two where Koussevitzky allows the trumpets' high pedal F to overtop the orchestra, transforming Brahms's F-A-F into a blandly tautological F-F-F.

Starting the symphony is not easy, as one of its most sure-footed contemporary interpreters, Marin Alsop, told James Jolly in a Brahms symposium in Gramophone in March 2005: 'It's quite tricky to find the right tempo that propels it without pushing it too much. This is crucial to Brahms: giving it space without making it sound slow.' She added, 'I think great orchestras can really do that. They can fill in the time.' One way of increasing the thrust of the opening is to make an unmarked crescendo in the already excoriating second bar. George Szell does this to searing effect in a live Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra performance in 1952, though not in his more generously paced 1964 Cleveland studio recording. As Alsop suggests, it takes exceptional skill successfully to drive this first movement forward and yet retain a weight and presence. Szell, who, like Furtwängler, knew the work inside out and played it in different ways on different occasions, had that ability.

CLASSIC versus ROMANTIC

Furtwängler believed that 'naturalness of utterance' is 'the difficult, the ultimate thing' in Brahms interpretation. ('Preternatural' would be the best word to describe his own Brahms.) If what we are looking for is directness and clarity of line, with the score's frequent technical difficulties unassumingly resolved at no cost to the music's power and presence, then Felix Weingartner with the LPO in 1938, Otto Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1957, Sir Adrian Boult with the LSO in 1970 or James Loughran with the Hallé in 1975 - all English orchestras - collectively emerge as well-nigh exemplary interpreters. A fifth such performance, by Günter Wand and the North German Radio SO (1983) based in Brahms's native Hamburg, also has that distinctive northern European pedigree.

None of these classicised readings would be of any account if they were not driven on by a powerful sustaining pulse. Dogged good sense (and the kind of short-windedness that can often accompany it) is a great subverter of this particular work, as we can hear in versions as far apart in time as Eduard van Beinum's in 1956 and David Zinman's in 2010. Nor is a tried-and-tested reading guaranteed to take flight on every occasion. Karl Böhm, Marek Janowski and Wolfgang Sawallisch all impressed with first recordings of the Third, but failed to repeat the effect on later occasions.

Wilhelm Furtwängler created his own sense of occasion. For him the Third Symphony was a work of sudden surges, delayed charges and buried detonations. 'Subjective?' asked Michael Oliver in Gramophone of Furtwängler's Brahms. 'Certainly. If one of a conductor's functions is to realise the composer's intentions, another is to convince you that those intentions matter.' Furtwängler conducted the symphony many times, yet by a happy chance his two extant Berlin-made recordings are complementary. The 1954 performance is the more serene, the 1949 - an experience unique in the annals of the work on record - the more impassioned, an essay in what Furtwängler himself called 'the energy of becoming, inexorability and the force of onward motion'. So caught up is Furtwängler in Brahms's tragic mood, he even adds to the composer's own careful revisions of the orchestration by providing minatory timpani rolls either side of the arrival of the finale's second subject. Furtwängler's is a forward-moving performance built on an epic scale, a point underlined by his decision here (though not in 1954) to take the exposition repeat.

COURAGE AND CONVICTION

The structure of the symphony's opening movement tends to be weakened if the exposition repeat is ignored. This is particularly so in performances that further undermine the structure with the kind of unwanted accelerations and decelerations favoured by Sergiu Celibidache in his live 1976 Stuttgart performance. The fact that Celibidache's 1987 Munich recording is unstable in entirely different ways suggests that he never (as Felix Weingartner put it) fully 'assimilated' the work. Not that he was alone in this. The 1952 RCA recording from Arturo Toscanini was a movement-by-movement identikit assemblage based on the old man's attempt to memorise the best features of four separate NBC radio performances. It was a curious procedure. Cloning performances, one's own or other people's, is doubly defeating in the context of a work that openly engages the question of the vulnerability of private sensibility and the value of individual vision. Yet, such was Toscanini's influence, even the self-evidently flawed 1952 RCA recording was slavishly copied, right down to the maestro's egregious subito piano in bar six. A recording by James Levine and the Chicago SO offers a particularly close paraphrase. Ironically, it was Toscanini's protégé Guido Cantelli who best grasped, or was best able to realise, what his mentor was attempting. Cantelli's 1955 Kingsway Hall recording was notable in its day. If there was more impulse to the first movement, and a clearer sifting of internal voicings, it would be a front-runner still.

A conductor who omits the exposition repeat but whose broad tempi and richly assimilated understanding of the symphony's argument convinces one of the rightness of his action is Kurt Sanderling in his 1972 recording with the Dresden Staatskapelle. This is an epic traversal of the symphony whose 72-bar exposition needs no repetition, so completely does Sanderling set out the symphony's terrain to our gaze. You might think that such an effect could be achieved only by a conductor in the full maturity of his art. This is true, though in 1970 Bernard Haitink, the then-41-year-old principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, offered a similarly broadly based reading. It is a version that continues to impress with the certainty of its aim and the clarity and purity of its sound - a collaborative act between conductor, orchestra and the record's producer Jaap van Ginneken, the unaffected truthfulness of whose recordings remain a lesson to us all. Haitink's approach to the symphony has not greatly changed down the years but ways of preserving it have become a good deal more slipshod. His 2004 LSO Live account is not only less well played, it is much more crudely recorded.

The principal danger of such slow-drawn readings is the loss of concentration in lyric subjects and at critical points of transition. This is one of the reasons why Leonard Bernstein's interminable 1981 Vienna Philharmonic recording should be avoided at all costs. Mariss Jansons is far less self-indulgent in his broadly argued live 2010 Bavarian Radio performance, but there are pitfalls here which even he doesn't entirely avoid. On paper Carlo Maria Giulini's 1990 Vienna recording should also come into this category, but Giulini's speeds are deceptive. As Edward Seckerson has noted, 'His innate sense of architectural coherence and the sheer will of his commitment keep heart and mind engaged.' Exquisitely painted by the orchestra, this is a reading that can be set beside Sanderling's in terms of its power and long-term vision.

Fifty-minute traversals of the symphony, such as we have from Haitink, Sanderling and Giulini, occupy a very different world to the kind of 30-minute lick-and-a-promise performances served up by Bruno Walter in Vienna in 1936 and New York in 1953. How different these are from the 83-year-old Walter's broader, more rhythmically stable but not less vivid 1960 California-made recording with the hand-picked Columbia Symphony Orchestra. This is one of the great Brahms Thirds - what one imagined Walter's Brahms always was but which the early recordings gainsay. Comparison can be made here with Eugen Jochum: his 1938 Hamburg performance barely holds together; his 1956 Berlin version is much improved; his 1976 LPO recording (EMI, 10/77) is best of all.

QUESTIONS OF COLOUR

One aspect of the Third Symphony, which Walter and an almost excessively analytical CBS recording bring into focus, is the particular quality of Brahms's orchestration. This is something you will also find in Fritz Reiner's exquisitely played 1957 Chicago performance and Herbert von Karajan's 1961 account with the Vienna Philharmonic, a performance that suggests a more than passing debt by Brahms to Schumann and to the tone-painting of Wagner. Karajan's three Berlin versions are a good deal less interesting, compromised as they are by the conductor's almost studied disregard for the symphony's troubled psychopathology.

A conductor without a dispassionate bone in his body was Sir John Barbirolli. He made two recordings of the Third Symphony, the first in Manchester in 1952, the second in Vienna in 1967; both are memorable, both too little known. The absence of an exposition repeat is more of a problem with the swifter and lighter-toned Hallé performance (which gets off to a rocky start with over-prominent trumpets in bar two). Yet this is wonderful Brahms: trenchant, vital, from the heart. A slowish finale notwithstanding, the later Vienna Philharmonic recording is finer still. Trevor Harvey praised it to the skies in these columns in February 1969. Yet, like the distinguished Boult recording made in 1970, it is a version that has been more honoured in its absence than in its availability.

Barbirolli's reading was unusual for its swift yet at the same time affecting and finely pointed way with the symphony's two inner movements (a quality shared with an offering from Sir Thomas Beecham, an infrequent visitor to this particular musical shore, whose otherwise overly fierce 1957 Symphony of the Air performance can be found on YouTube). One episode is of particular importance: the sombre triplet-dominated six-note phrase on clarinet and bassoon which casts its shadow not only over the slow movement but over the finale too. Elgar described the motif's later appearance as 'the tragic outcome of a wistful theme'. Is it their exposure to Elgar's own music that makes British conductors such effective purveyors of the episode's melancholy, far-off feel?

A DECLINING MARKET

Memorable recordings of the Third Symphony became increasingly scarce in the later years of the 20th century as the old ways of conducting the music were either forgotten or proscribed. Sadly, the fresh interest period practice brought to the symphonies of Beethoven worked less well for those of Brahms. Performance historian Robert Philip wondered whether Roger Norrington knew how the Third generally went. Norrington's was, he said on Radio 3's Record Review, 'an unusually straight performance compared with the disciplined yet highly nuanced performances of Szell or Bruno Walter'. Jonathan Swain, writing in Gramophone, thought it more 'a trail-blazing performance' than 'an interpretation that had had time to mature'. Much was made of the lighter string sound and the more forward winds. But this was nothing new. Such balances are writ large in Klemperer's stoically splendid 1957 EMI recording.

Mention was also made of the reduced size of the orchestra. In the 1880s, the Vienna Philharmonic, which gave the work its premiere under Hans Richter, was heard alongside Hans von Bülow's Meiningen Orchestra. Brahms's friend the critic Eduard Hanslick thought the 45-strong Meiningen Orchestra 'comparatively weak', lacking the 'brilliance and fullness of tone' of the 90-man Philharmonic. There is evidence that Brahms, too, could be irked by Bülow's small-scale, over-literal readings, and by the mannerisms he occasionally found it necessary to introduce. How satisfied would Brahms have been, one wonders, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's closely managed but oddly tired-sounding 1997 Berlin recording? In 2008, a further period-instrument performance appeared, directed by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. It boasted tinder-dry sonorities and set a new land-speed record for the finale.

The most accomplished Brahms Third of the new century came from Marin Alsop and the LPO in 2005, a long-drawn, dark-hued reading blessed with exquisite phrasing, keen articulation and good rhythm. Sir Simon Rattle's 2008 recording revived the old Berlin Philharmonic Brahms sound in a performance that went deeper than Karajan's but which suffered from moments of unwanted calculation. There is nothing of this in Claudio Abbado's 1989 Berlin recording. This was made in September of that year, barely two months after Karajan's death and shortly before the players elected Abbado as their chief conductor. It was clearly a meeting of some moment. The Berliners are on peerless form, an asset which Abbado, ever the thoroughbred musician, exploits to remarkable effect in a reading that marries impetus and eloquence in special measure.

Brahms's Third Symphony is difficult to capture in a single snapshot. The one performance that comes close to being all-encompassing is Furtwängler's in Berlin in 1949, though the sound is indifferent, the audience occasionally intrusive. Among currently available, single-disc versions, Claudio Abbado's is a clear first choice. This reading ranks with the best of any era, and there is a visceral quality to the playing which is de rigueur in this symphony. More classically minded Brahmsians should consider Klemperer or, if a single CD is sought, Günter Wand. The best of the rest can generally be found with a little looking. This is a symphony, highly strung and elusive to the touch, which it pays to collect.


RECOMMENDATIONS

BUDGET RICHES:

LPO / Alsop / Naxos 8 557430

Discussing Brahms's Third Symphony is one thing, conducting it is something else. Marin Alsop does both shrewdly, sensitively, perceptively. This is the latest in a distinguished line of LPO Thirds stretching back to Weingartner in 1938.

THE CLASSICIST'S VIEW:

Philharmonia / Klemperer / EMI 562742-2

Born and brought up to Brahms, Klemperer is the most dauntless of the symphony's classicising interpreters. What on LP was a rather acerbic-sounding recording emerges on CD with greater body and warmth.

THE UNMISSABLE:

BPO / Furtwängler / EMI 565513-2

The sound here is fragile and the audience intrusive, but this is a performance like no other. You may not sleep for nights after hearing it, but you'll be richer and wiser for the experience.

THE TOP CHOICE:

BPO / Abbado / DG 429 765-2GH

This is the finest of the modern versions, a performance that sits well beside classic recordings such as those by Krauss in the 1930s, Walter and Barbirolli in the 60s, and Sanderling in the 70s.


SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Date / Artists / Record company (review date)

1928 Philadelphia Orch / Stokowski / Biddulph WHL017/18 (8/94R)

1930 VPO / Krauss / Biddulph M WHL052 (6/99)

1932 Concertgebouw Orch / Mengelberg / Andante AN1973-9 (4/33R)

1938 LPO / Weingartner / EMI 764256-2 (9/39R)

1949 BPO / Furtwängler / EMI 565513-2 (2/96R)

1952 Hallé Orch / Barbirolli / Barbirolli Society SJB1020 (5/53R)

1952 Concertgebouw Orch / Szell / Audiophile APL101 561

1952 Philh Orch / Toscanini / Testament SBT3167 (3/00)

1954 BPO / Furtwängler / DG 423 572-2GDO (5/76R)

1955 Philh Orch / Cantelli / Testament SBT1173 (9/56R, 12/99)

1957 Philh Orch / Klemperer / EMI 562742-2 (6/58R)

1957 Chicago SO / Reiner / RCA 09026 61793-2 (12/58R)

1960 Columbia SO / Walter / Sony SMK64471 (2/61R)

1961 VPO / Karajan / Decca 478 2661DOR (9/62R)

1964 Cleveland Orch / Szell / Sony SBK47652 (8/65R, 6/96)

1967 VPO / Barbirolli / Royal ROY6434 (2/69)

1970 LSO / Boult / EMI 769203-2 (2/71R)

1970 Concertgebouw Orch / Haitink / Philips 442 068-2PB4 (3/71R, 9/94)

1972 Dresden Staatskapelle / Sanderling / RCA 74321 30367-2 (10/73R, 1/97)

1975 Hallé / Loughran / EMI 75753-2 (7/76R)

1976 LPO / Jochum / EMI SLS5093 (10/77)

1983 NDR SO / Wand / RCA 88697 71136-2 (2/87R)

1987 Munich PO / Celibidache / EMI 556846-2

1989 BPO / Abbado / DG 429 765-2GH (1/91); 435 683-2GH4

1990 VPO / Giulini / Newton 8802063 (8/91R)

1990 London Classical Plyrs / Norrington / EMI 556118-2 (8/96)

1997 BPO / Harnoncourt / Teldec 0630 13136-2 (11/97); Warner 2564 69004-9

2005 LPO / Alsop / Naxos S 8 557430 (3/07)

2008 Orch Révolutionnaire et Romantique / Gardiner / SDG SDG704 (11/09)

2008 BPO / Rattle / EMI 267254-2 (A/09)

2010 Bavarian Rad SO / Jansons / BR-Klassik 900111 (6/11) >>

[Herman]

"Karajan's three Berlin versions are a good deal less interesting, compromised as they are by the conductor's almost studied disregard for the symphony's troubled psychopathology."

Hilarious.

This writer says this music reminds him of a couple lines by W.B. Yeats, just to show off his erudition, and next thing we know conductors have to deliver on a "troubled psychopathology"?

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:28:52 AM UTC-5, Herman wrote:

> "Karajan's three Berlin versions are a good deal less interesting, compromised as they are by the conductor's almost studied disregard for the symphony's troubled psychopathology."(Richard Osborne)

> This writer says this music reminds him of a couple lines by W.B. Yeats, just to show off his erudition, and next thing we know conductors have to deliver on a "troubled psychopathology"?

I think you are too cynical, Herman, or feeling ignorant today. There is nothing particularly erudite in mentioning Yeats, and one has to doubt that he does it to show off, but rather to elucidate. If you don't know Yeats, you might well feel illiterate, but you might also be happy to learn something about that poet.

The term psychopathology did, however, stop me in my tracks. Not sure what he is getting at there. He could have made his meaning clearer by explaining rather than using a single term.

On another subject, I find it odd that the name George Solti comes up so rarely in any comparative studies of orchestral recordings. For decades Solti was the "it" conductor, filling CH with his Chicago troops, selling buckets of records. Then he died and his reputation would appear to have died with him. Nobody speaks of his Beethoven, Brahms, or Mahler in hushed tones anymore. It happened to Toscanini, Walter, Klemperer, and others. Toscanini, Walter and Klemperer have been partially reinstated, I guess. Reiner seems to have withstood this particular form of decay since his death. Stokowski, too. Big mystique there. Giulini is holding on for dear death, as many of his old recordings are still highly valued. Abbado is freshly dead; nobody can tell what will happen to his reputation in the coming years. Perhaps he, too, will go the way of Solti? No way of knowing from this vantage point.

Incidentally, I agree with RO that the Barbirolli VPO versions of the Brahms symphonies have been hard to find for too long. No idea why. I have them both on LP (Angel box set) and CD (another Royal Classics reissue?). Always liked them, but they have been very elusive.

TD

[Alex Brown]

Yeah, RO's prose is often overly-purple. OTOH I usually find his overall
assessments to be sound.

[Randy Lane]

On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:02:48 PM UTC-7, Oscar wrote:
> Oddly, James Levine's excellent 1994 recording w/ VPO is not listed in the 'select' discography. One of my fave 'modern' versions. From gramophone.co.uk http://tinyurl.com/l9sddg8 << Brahms Symphony No 3: which recording is best? Richard Osborne surveys the finest recordings of the Third Symphony Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (This article originally appeared in Gramophone, April 2012) 'It is enormously rewarding - one of the world's grandest bracers. What a lift in those themes, and what tenderness beneath their power! Brahms for ever!' So wrote WR Anderson in Gramophone in September 1935 at the end of a survey during which he had struggled to decide whether Leopold Stokowski or Willem Mengelberg had his vote in Brahms's Third Symphony. Had Clemens Krauss's superb 1930 Vienna Philharmonic HMV recording been available, WRA might have worried less. It is none the less remarkable how well this most elusive of great 19th-century symphonies was served in the early years of electronic recording. The Third is the most personal of Brahms's four symphonies, and the shortest. It is a glorious work, yet a deeply troubled one. And there is the added peculiarity of its being, unusually for its genre and age, a symphony in which all four movements end quietly. Brahms was 50 and at the zenith of his art when he completed it in 1883. He remained resolutely silent as to the work's inner content yet the music itself provides clues. The great summons at the opening rests on the notes F-A-F ('Frei aber froh', 'Free but happy'), a cipher Brahms had used in response to his friend Joseph Joachim's motto F-A-E ('Frei aber einsam', 'Free but lonely') in that halcyon age in Düsseldorf in the early 1850s when the young Brahms was taken under the wing of Robert and Clara Schumann. It can be no coincidence that there is a clear echo of Schumann's own Third Symphony, the Rhenish, in the passionate down-sweep of the strings in bar three of the Brahms. Were Schumann and his troubled end a cue for this great outpouring? Brahms's use of the F-A-F cipher is itself ambiguous. The 'A' in bar two is an A flat, tipping the work instantly towards the minor key, with a sinister tritone adding to the sense of angst. And what of the later transformation of the exposition's gracious dance into a nightmare waltz, or the crisis-laden mood of much of the work's finale? Time and again during this symphony, WB Yeats's words come to mind: 'For Nature's pulled her tragic buskin on/And all the rant's a mirror of my mood.' Too multifaceted to be known from a single interpretation, the Third Symphony can be played classically or romantically, briskly or with great breadth. Brahms himself was not prescriptive when it came to such matters. Tempo modification fascinated him to the point of obsession, but he knew that speed itself is relative. Metronome marks were anathema to him ('I have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together'), and he mistrusted musicians who put their faith in them. FIRST RECORDINGS The earliest extant recording of the Third Symphony was made in 1928 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is finely played without undue resort to saturated string tone. The principal drawback is an over-inflated account of the troubled pastorale which is the work's Andante. At a little over 10 minutes, Stokowski's performance of this movement is not quite as protracted as his 1959 Houston version, but it remains out of scale with the work as a whole. The 1932 Willem Mengelberg recording is a somewhat portentous affair. The first movement, complete with its exposition repeat, is positively Gladstonian and the two inner movements are much pulled about. Neither of these versions compares well with the 37-year-old Clemens Krauss's 1930 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, which remains one of the truest of all accounts of the symphony on record. It is a beautifully articulated performance, strongly drawn yet rhythmically crisp, with a slow movement that is every bit as expressive as Stokowski's but better paced. Sergey Koussevitzky's 1945 Boston recording (RCA, 7/74R) has similar qualities to Krauss's, though there is a fearful solecism in bar two where Koussevitzky allows the trumpets' high pedal F to overtop the orchestra, transforming Brahms's F-A-F into a blandly tautological F-F-F. Starting the symphony is not easy, as one of its most sure-footed contemporary interpreters, Marin Alsop, told James Jolly in a Brahms symposium in Gramophone in March 2005: 'It's quite tricky to find the right tempo that propels it without pushing it too much. This is crucial to Brahms: giving it space without making it sound slow.' She added, 'I think great orchestras can really do that. They can fill in the time.' One way of increasing the thrust of the opening is to make an unmarked crescendo in the already excoriating second bar. George Szell does this to searing effect in a live Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra performance in 1952, though not in his more generously paced 1964 Cleveland studio recording. As Alsop suggests, it takes exceptional skill successfully to drive this first movement forward and yet retain a weight and presence. Szell, who, like Furtwängler, knew the work inside out and played it in different ways on different occasions, had that ability. CLASSIC versus ROMANTIC Furtwängler believed that 'naturalness of utterance' is 'the difficult, the ultimate thing' in Brahms interpretation. ('Preternatural' would be the best word to describe his own Brahms.) If what we are looking for is directness and clarity of line, with the score's frequent technical difficulties unassumingly resolved at no cost to the music's power and presence, then Felix Weingartner with the LPO in 1938, Otto Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1957, Sir Adrian Boult with the LSO in 1970 or James Loughran with the Hallé in 1975 - all English orchestras - collectively emerge as well-nigh exemplary interpreters. A fifth such performance, by Günter Wand and the North German Radio SO (1983) based in Brahms's native Hamburg, also has that distinctive northern European pedigree. None of these classicised readings would be of any account if they were not driven on by a powerful sustaining pulse. Dogged good sense (and the kind of short-windedness that can often accompany it) is a great subverter of this particular work, as we can hear in versions as far apart in time as Eduard van Beinum's in 1956 and David Zinman's in 2010. Nor is a tried-and-tested reading guaranteed to take flight on every occasion. Karl Böhm, Marek Janowski and Wolfgang Sawallisch all impressed with first recordings of the Third, but failed to repeat the effect on later occasions. Wilhelm Furtwängler created his own sense of occasion. For him the Third Symphony was a work of sudden surges, delayed charges and buried detonations. 'Subjective?' asked Michael Oliver in Gramophone of Furtwängler's Brahms. 'Certainly. If one of a conductor's functions is to realise the composer's intentions, another is to convince you that those intentions matter.' Furtwängler conducted the symphony many times, yet by a happy chance his two extant Berlin-made recordings are complementary. The 1954 performance is the more serene, the 1949 - an experience unique in the annals of the work on record - the more impassioned, an essay in what Furtwängler himself called 'the energy of becoming, inexorability and the force of onward motion'. So caught up is Furtwängler in Brahms's tragic mood, he even adds to the composer's own careful revisions of the orchestration by providing minatory timpani rolls either side of the arrival of the finale's second subject. Furtwängler's is a forward-moving performance built on an epic scale, a point underlined by his decision here (though not in 1954) to take the exposition repeat. COURAGE AND CONVICTION The structure of the symphony's opening movement tends to be weakened if the exposition repeat is ignored. This is particularly so in performances that further undermine the structure with the kind of unwanted accelerations and decelerations favoured by Sergiu Celibidache in his live 1976 Stuttgart performance. The fact that Celibidache's 1987 Munich recording is unstable in entirely different ways suggests that he never (as Felix Weingartner put it) fully 'assimilated' the work. Not that he was alone in this. The 1952 RCA recording from Arturo Toscanini was a movement-by-movement identikit assemblage based on the old man's attempt to memorise the best features of four separate NBC radio performances. It was a curious procedure. Cloning performances, one's own or other people's, is doubly defeating in the context of a work that openly engages the question of the vulnerability of private sensibility and the value of individual vision. Yet, such was Toscanini's influence, even the self-evidently flawed 1952 RCA recording was slavishly copied, right down to the maestro's egregious subito piano in bar six. A recording by James Levine and the Chicago SO offers a particularly close paraphrase. Ironically, it was Toscanini's protégé Guido Cantelli who best grasped, or was best able to realise, what his mentor was attempting. Cantelli's 1955 Kingsway Hall recording was notable in its day. If there was more impulse to the first movement, and a clearer sifting of internal voicings, it would be a front-runner still. A conductor who omits the exposition repeat but whose broad tempi and richly assimilated understanding of the symphony's argument convinces one of the rightness of his action is Kurt Sanderling in his 1972 recording with the Dresden Staatskapelle. This is an epic traversal of the symphony whose 72-bar exposition needs no repetition, so completely does Sanderling set out the symphony's terrain to our gaze. You might think that such an effect could be achieved only by a conductor in the full maturity of his art. This is true, though in 1970 Bernard Haitink, the then-41-year-old principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, offered a similarly broadly based reading. It is a version that continues to impress with the certainty of its aim and the clarity and purity of its sound - a collaborative act between conductor, orchestra and the record's producer Jaap van Ginneken, the unaffected truthfulness of whose recordings remain a lesson to us all. Haitink's approach to the symphony has not greatly changed down the years but ways of preserving it have become a good deal more slipshod. His 2004 LSO Live account is not only less well played, it is much more crudely recorded. The principal danger of such slow-drawn readings is the loss of concentration in lyric subjects and at critical points of transition. This is one of the reasons why Leonard Bernstein's interminable 1981 Vienna Philharmonic recording should be avoided at all costs. Mariss Jansons is far less self-indulgent in his broadly argued live 2010 Bavarian Radio performance, but there are pitfalls here which even he doesn't entirely avoid. On paper Carlo Maria Giulini's 1990 Vienna recording should also come into this category, but Giulini's speeds are deceptive. As Edward Seckerson has noted, 'His innate sense of architectural coherence and the sheer will of his commitment keep heart and mind engaged.' Exquisitely painted by the orchestra, this is a reading that can be set beside Sanderling's in terms of its power and long-term vision. Fifty-minute traversals of the symphony, such as we have from Haitink, Sanderling and Giulini, occupy a very different world to the kind of 30-minute lick-and-a-promise performances served up by Bruno Walter in Vienna in 1936 and New York in 1953. How different these are from the 83-year-old Walter's broader, more rhythmically stable but not less vivid 1960 California-made recording with the hand-picked Columbia Symphony Orchestra. This is one of the great Brahms Thirds - what one imagined Walter's Brahms always was but which the early recordings gainsay. Comparison can be made here with Eugen Jochum: his 1938 Hamburg performance barely holds together; his 1956 Berlin version is much improved; his 1976 LPO recording (EMI, 10/77) is best of all. QUESTIONS OF COLOUR One aspect of the Third Symphony, which Walter and an almost excessively analytical CBS recording bring into focus, is the particular quality of Brahms's orchestration. This is something you will also find in Fritz Reiner's exquisitely played 1957 Chicago performance and Herbert von Karajan's 1961 account with the Vienna Philharmonic, a performance that suggests a more than passing debt by Brahms to Schumann and to the tone-painting of Wagner. Karajan's three Berlin versions are a good deal less interesting, compromised as they are by the conductor's almost studied disregard for the symphony's troubled psychopathology. A conductor without a dispassionate bone in his body was Sir John Barbirolli. He made two recordings of the Third Symphony, the first in Manchester in 1952, the second in Vienna in 1967; both are memorable, both too little known. The absence of an exposition repeat is more of a problem with the swifter and lighter-toned Hallé performance (which gets off to a rocky start with over-prominent trumpets in bar two). Yet this is wonderful Brahms: trenchant, vital, from the heart. A slowish finale notwithstanding, the later Vienna Philharmonic recording is finer still. Trevor Harvey praised it to the skies in these columns in February 1969. Yet, like the distinguished Boult recording made in 1970, it is a version that has been more honoured in its absence than in its availability. Barbirolli's reading was unusual for its swift yet at the same time affecting and finely pointed way with the symphony's two inner movements (a quality shared with an offering from Sir Thomas Beecham, an infrequent visitor to this particular musical shore, whose otherwise overly fierce 1957 Symphony of the Air performance can be found on YouTube). One episode is of particular importance: the sombre triplet-dominated six-note phrase on clarinet and bassoon which casts its shadow not only over the slow movement but over the finale too. Elgar described the motif's later appearance as 'the tragic outcome of a wistful theme'. Is it their exposure to Elgar's own music that makes British conductors such effective purveyors of the episode's melancholy, far-off feel? A DECLINING MARKET Memorable recordings of the Third Symphony became increasingly scarce in the later years of the 20th century as the old ways of conducting the music were either forgotten or proscribed. Sadly, the fresh interest period practice brought to the symphonies of Beethoven worked less well for those of Brahms. Performance historian Robert Philip wondered whether Roger Norrington knew how the Third generally went. Norrington's was, he said on Radio 3's Record Review, 'an unusually straight performance compared with the disciplined yet highly nuanced performances of Szell or Bruno Walter'. Jonathan Swain, writing in Gramophone, thought it more 'a trail-blazing performance' than 'an interpretation that had had time to mature'. Much was made of the lighter string sound and the more forward winds. But this was nothing new. Such balances are writ large in Klemperer's stoically splendid 1957 EMI recording. Mention was also made of the reduced size of the orchestra. In the 1880s, the Vienna Philharmonic, which gave the work its premiere under Hans Richter, was heard alongside Hans von Bülow's Meiningen Orchestra. Brahms's friend the critic Eduard Hanslick thought the 45-strong Meiningen Orchestra 'comparatively weak', lacking the 'brilliance and fullness of tone' of the 90-man Philharmonic. There is evidence that Brahms, too, could be irked by Bülow's small-scale, over-literal readings, and by the mannerisms he occasionally found it necessary to introduce. How satisfied would Brahms have been, one wonders, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's closely managed but oddly tired-sounding 1997 Berlin recording? In 2008, a further period-instrument performance appeared, directed by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. It boasted tinder-dry sonorities and set a new land-speed record for the finale. The most accomplished Brahms Third of the new century came from Marin Alsop and the LPO in 2005, a long-drawn, dark-hued reading blessed with exquisite phrasing, keen articulation and good rhythm. Sir Simon Rattle's 2008 recording revived the old Berlin Philharmonic Brahms sound in a performance that went deeper than Karajan's but which suffered from moments of unwanted calculation. There is nothing of this in Claudio Abbado's 1989 Berlin recording. This was made in September of that year, barely two months after Karajan's death and shortly before the players elected Abbado as their chief conductor. It was clearly a meeting of some moment. The Berliners are on peerless form, an asset which Abbado, ever the thoroughbred musician, exploits to remarkable effect in a reading that marries impetus and eloquence in special measure. Brahms's Third Symphony is difficult to capture in a single snapshot. The one performance that comes close to being all-encompassing is Furtwängler's in Berlin in 1949, though the sound is indifferent, the audience occasionally intrusive. Among currently available, single-disc versions, Claudio Abbado's is a clear first choice. This reading ranks with the best of any era, and there is a visceral quality to the playing which is de rigueur in this symphony. More classically minded Brahmsians should consider Klemperer or, if a single CD is sought, Günter Wand. The best of the rest can generally be found with a little looking. This is a symphony, highly strung and elusive to the touch, which it pays to collect. RECOMMENDATIONS BUDGET RICHES: LPO / Alsop / Naxos 8 557430 Discussing Brahms's Third Symphony is one thing, conducting it is something else. Marin Alsop does both shrewdly, sensitively, perceptively. This is the latest in a distinguished line of LPO Thirds stretching back to Weingartner in 1938. THE CLASSICIST'S VIEW: Philharmonia / Klemperer / EMI 562742-2 Born and brought up to Brahms, Klemperer is the most dauntless of the symphony's classicising interpreters. What on LP was a rather acerbic-sounding recording emerges on CD with greater body and warmth. THE UNMISSABLE: BPO / Furtwängler / EMI 565513-2 The sound here is fragile and the audience intrusive, but this is a performance like no other. You may not sleep for nights after hearing it, but you'll be richer and wiser for the experience. THE TOP CHOICE: BPO / Abbado / DG 429 765-2GH This is the finest of the modern versions, a performance that sits well beside classic recordings such as those by Krauss in the 1930s, Walter and Barbirolli in the 60s, and Sanderling in the 70s. SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY Date / Artists / Record company (review date) 1928 Philadelphia Orch / Stokowski / Biddulph WHL017/18 (8/94R) 1930 VPO / Krauss / Biddulph M WHL052 (6/99) 1932 Concertgebouw Orch / Mengelberg / Andante AN1973-9 (4/33R) 1938 LPO / Weingartner / EMI 764256-2 (9/39R) 1949 BPO / Furtwängler / EMI 565513-2 (2/96R) 1952 Hallé Orch / Barbirolli / Barbirolli Society SJB1020 (5/53R) 1952 Concertgebouw Orch / Szell / Audiophile APL101 561 1952 Philh Orch / Toscanini / Testament SBT3167 (3/00) 1954 BPO / Furtwängler / DG 423 572-2GDO (5/76R) 1955 Philh Orch / Cantelli / Testament SBT1173 (9/56R, 12/99) 1957 Philh Orch / Klemperer / EMI 562742-2 (6/58R) 1957 Chicago SO / Reiner / RCA 09026 61793-2 (12/58R) 1960 Columbia SO / Walter / Sony SMK64471 (2/61R) 1961 VPO / Karajan / Decca 478 2661DOR (9/62R) 1964 Cleveland Orch / Szell / Sony SBK47652 (8/65R, 6/96) 1967 VPO / Barbirolli / Royal ROY6434 (2/69) 1970 LSO / Boult / EMI 769203-2 (2/71R) 1970 Concertgebouw Orch / Haitink / Philips 442 068-2PB4 (3/71R, 9/94) 1972 Dresden Staatskapelle / Sanderling / RCA 74321 30367-2 (10/73R, 1/97) 1975 Hallé / Loughran / EMI 75753-2 (7/76R) 1976 LPO / Jochum / EMI SLS5093 (10/77) 1983 NDR SO / Wand / RCA 88697 71136-2 (2/87R) 1987 Munich PO / Celibidache / EMI 556846-2 1989 BPO / Abbado / DG 429 765-2GH (1/91); 435 683-2GH4 1990 VPO / Giulini / Newton 8802063 (8/91R) 1990 London Classical Plyrs / Norrington / EMI 556118-2 (8/96) 1997 BPO / Harnoncourt / Teldec 0630 13136-2 (11/97); Warner 2564 69004-9 2005 LPO / Alsop / Naxos S 8 557430 (3/07) 2008 Orch Révolutionnaire et Romantique / Gardiner / SDG SDG704 (11/09) 2008 BPO / Rattle / EMI 267254-2 (A/09) 2010 Bavarian Rad SO / Jansons / BR-Klassik 900111 (6/11) >>

Istvan Kertész is also not mentioned. And I don't find his Brahms mentioned often by other RMCRers either. Am I a lone admirer of his Brahms cycle?

[Bastian Kubis]

On 02/27/2014 05:02 AM, Oscar wrote:
> [...]

>
> THE UNMISSABLE:
>
> BPO / Furtwängler / EMI 565513-2
>
> The sound here is fragile and the audience intrusive, but this is a performance like no other. You may not sleep for nights after hearing it, but you'll be richer and wiser for the experience.
>

> [...]

Can someone else comment on this Furtwängler recording? I don't know
the 1949 one. I have the M&A set that includes the 1954 3rd (and
additional recordings of the 1st and 4th); I always was under the
impression that Furtwängler connaisseurs valued that one higher. [Plus,
as much as I love Furtwängler in Brahms' other three symphonies, I never
thought he was particularly successful in the 3rd.]

[I also need to check myself at some point whether Jochum's LPO version
really "is best of all", surpassing the wonderful Berlin version?!]

Bastian

[Greg]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:36:17 AM UTC-5, Bastian Kubis wrote:
<snip>

>
> Can someone else comment on this Furtwängler recording? I don't know
>
> the 1949 one. I have the M&A set that includes the 1954 3rd (and
>
> additional recordings of the 1st and 4th); I always was under the
>
> impression that Furtwängler connaisseurs valued that one higher. [Plus,
>
> as much as I love Furtwängler in Brahms' other three symphonies, I never
>
> thought he was particularly successful in the 3rd.]
>
>
>
> [I also need to check myself at some point whether Jochum's LPO version
>
> really "is best of all", surpassing the wonderful Berlin version?!]
>
>
>
> Bastian

Re: Furtwangler
It's been a while, but I have heard both of them and came away thinking: (1) the 1954 was better, and (2) both can be safely ignored.

Re: Jochum
I do think the LPO recording is a bit better than the BPO one for this symphony (but certainly not the other three). If I recall correctly, in the outer movements in the LPO recording Jochum employs some very effective rubato in key places, making for a particularly dramatic reading. What keeps it out of contention for me is the 3rd movement, which completely misses the mark imo.

Re: Gramophone/Osborne
I suppose this is about what I would expect from this source. If you place every recording of this piece in a musical blender and average them all out, you would get something like Abbado/BPO, so that's obviously the first choice. (Not that it's a bad recording - it's very well played, reasonably dramatic, sensible, etc...) If one finds Abbado too thrilling for one's delicate constitution, there's always Alsop, which has the added benefit of being played by the obviously unbeatable LPO. Throw in some lavish praise for completely forgettable recordings by Boult and Barbirolli. Praise the notably colorless Reiner recording for its color. Recommend the worst thing in Haitink's and Furtwangler's cycles. Totally ignore great modern recordings like Levine/VPO and Chailly/Leipzig. Oh, and make sure to mention a few legitimately good and widely praised classic recordings like Klemperer, Walter, and Szell so as to not totally sacrifice all credibility. Yep, that's a Gramophone survey all right.

And can anyone figure out which Toscanini recording Osborne is ragging on? He cites the RCA recording in the text, but lists the live Philharmonia recording on Testament in the selective discography (surely one of the greatest mono recordings of this piece).

Greg

[gard...@gmail.com]

I had the same reaction; I don't recollect being blown over by the LPO version but on the other hand I can't say I have any memory of it at all, so I guess it needs to be revisited.

Mark

[Paul]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 7:26:02 AM UTC-8, Greg wrote:

> And can anyone figure out which Toscanini recording Osborne is ragging on? He cites the RCA recording in the text, but lists the live Philharmonia recording on Testament in the selective discography (surely one of the greatest mono recordings of this piece).

He's ragging on the RCA studio version; actually, repeating the standard view of that recording that has existed pretty much since it was issued.

The review's failure to mention either James Levine version renders the entire exercise pointless. Yes, there are lot of Brahms 3s out there, but come on. Abbado and Alsop over the Levines?

OTOH, good for Osborne for recognizing the stereo Bruno Walter, an exalted recording that is too easy to ignore today in light of the consensus that BW's stereo recordings do not succeed as well as his mono and 78-era counterparts.

[MiNe109]

The Alsop is still available for free on this collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-80s-Vol-1880s/dp/B002RHVBHU

Stephen

[Paul]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:14:50 AM UTC-8, MINe109 wrote:

> The Alsop is still available for free on this collection:

> http://www.amazon.com/Love-80s-Vol-1880s/dp/B002RHVBHU

Unavailable, it seems. LOL.

[MiNe109]

Sorry, I didn't check thoroughly enough! Thanks for the correction.

Stephen

[td]

Amazing.

You're happy when you agree with him. He's a cretin when he doesn't.

Ahem. You're not writing for The Gramophone, at least as far as I know. The Osborne has a pretty well-contoured profile after decades of writing for that magazine. He may not like Levine at all. And there is lots to rag about in Toscanini's NBCSO readings of Brahms. Driven? Mercilessly? Yeah, I think so.

Instead of complaining that he doesn't agree with you, it might be better to find what is interesting in what he does say and perhaps investigate his choices further? And try and hear what he's on about?

TD

[Dana John Hill]

On 2/27/2014 6:35 AM, td wrote:
>
> On another subject, I find it odd that the name George Solti comes up
> so rarely in any comparative studies of orchestral recordings. For
> decades Solti was the "it" conductor, filling CH with his Chicago
> troops, selling buckets of records. Then he died and his reputation
> would appear to have died with him. Nobody speaks of his Beethoven,
> Brahms, or Mahler in hushed tones anymore. It happened to Toscanini,
> Walter, Klemperer, and others. Toscanini, Walter and Klemperer have
> been partially reinstated, I guess. Reiner seems to have withstood
> this particular form of decay since his death. Stokowski, too. Big
> mystique there. Giulini is holding on for dear death, as many of his
> old recordings are still highly valued. Abbado is freshly dead;
> nobody can tell what will happen to his reputation in the coming
> years. Perhaps he, too, will go the way of Solti? No way of knowing
> from this vantage point.

I still read about Solti from time to time. I remember a review of a
Thielemann Bruckner 8 in New York last year in which the reviewer made
some references to Solti in the same music. And Solti's Mahler 8 comes
up a lot and must still sell well (if it hasn't already been released,
there's a Blu-ray in the works).

Nevertheless, even if he falls in esteem in every other respect, his
reputation as a Wagnerian will surely keep his memory alive everywhere.

Dana John Hill
Gainesville, Florida

[Paul]

Good to see your knee still jerks like a Pavlov dog - cretin.

[jrsnfld]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 9:33:31 AM UTC-8, Dana John Hill wrote:

> I still read about Solti from time to time. I remember a review of a
>
> Thielemann Bruckner 8 in New York last year in which the reviewer made
> some references to Solti in the same music. And Solti's Mahler 8 comes
> up a lot and must still sell well (if it hasn't already been released,
> there's a Blu-ray in the works).

> Nevertheless, even if he falls in esteem in every other respect, his
> reputation as a Wagnerian will surely keep his memory alive everywhere.

> Dana John Hill
> Gainesville, Florida

I don't buy Solti recordings much anymore, but last week I bought three of his most famous studio productions--Arabella, Hansel and Gretel, and the digital Marriage of Figaro. For some reason I'd neglected these classics for too long.

There are other ways to conduct this music--and he's triply fortunate to have great casts, orchestras, and engineering in each case, and but Solti manages to do more than hold my attention. The orchestral playing is superb, the textures clear and vibrant, and the pacing and phrasing burst with alertness at every turn. The singing is beyond praise, which is a signal that Solti was no slouch as an accompanist.

He was a top notch conductor in every way, even if he turned out some recordings where he couldn't seem to relax, and others where he couldn't seem to find that climax-a-minute energy. His way with phrasing and color had limits, to be sure, but more often than not he compels you to share his grip on the music (Brahms 3 included, part of a very successful set). I'd say Solti's legacy is secure. His popularity will wax and wane like any artist's, but he'll always have followers who understand his greatness.

--Jeff

[jrsnfld]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 7:59:02 AM UTC-8, Paul wrote:

> The review's failure to mention either James Levine version renders the entire exercise pointless. Yes, there are lot of Brahms 3s out there, but come on. Abbado and Alsop over the Levines?

Actually Osborne makes a point of dismissing Levine's first recording as an imitation of Toscanini. It's a superficial viewpoint, but at least he doesn't ignore Levine.

If your priorities don't include up-to-date sound or great playing or astute conducting, then yes, you might hesitate to agree with Osborne that Abbado deserves first consideration. I'm surprised that will all the fawning over British recordings, Osborne was able to acknowledge how good Abbado's cycle really is.

-Jeff

[Randy Lane]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:58:58 AM UTC-7, jrsnfld wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 9:33:31 AM UTC-8, Dana John Hill wrote: > I still read about Solti from time to time. I remember a review of a > > Thielemann Bruckner 8 in New York last year in which the reviewer made > some references to Solti in the same music. And Solti's Mahler 8 comes > up a lot and must still sell well (if it hasn't already been released, > there's a Blu-ray in the works). > Nevertheless, even if he falls in esteem in every other respect, his > reputation as a Wagnerian will surely keep his memory alive everywhere. > Dana John Hill > Gainesville, Florida I don't buy Solti recordings much anymore, but last week I bought three of his most famous studio productions--Arabella, Hansel and Gretel, and the digital Marriage of Figaro. For some reason I'd neglected these classics for too long. There are other ways to conduct this music--and he's triply fortunate to have great casts, orchestras, and engineering in each case, and but Solti manages to do more than hold my attention. The orchestral playing is superb, the textures clear and vibrant, and the pacing and phrasing burst with alertness at every turn. The singing is beyond praise, which is a signal that Solti was no slouch as an accompanist. He was a top notch conductor in every way, even if he turned out some recordings where he couldn't seem to relax, and others where he couldn't seem to find that climax-a-minute energy. His way with phrasing and color had limits, to be sure, but more often than not he compels you to share his grip on the music (Brahms 3 included, part of a very successful set). I'd say Solti's legacy is secure. His popularity will wax and wane like any artist's, but he'll always have followers who understand his greatness. --Jeff

I sure wish the Koreans would get the prequel to their Soltissimo-2 box out soon. For Solti they used the opposite of their Karajan strategy - they issued the 1970s recordings first. I wonder if Soltissimo-1 will have just the 1960s or everything prior to 1970? For Karajan's DG output splitting the boxes somewhat strictly by the decade (there are a few 1959 recordings in the 1960s box) made sense. For Solti it would be preferable to lump the 1950s and 1960s together. Since Decca has not issue many of his Vienna mono recordings on CD, a "complete" set of his pre-1970 Decca recordings would me a most welcome treat. There's probably not enough for a separate 1950s box. Of course the Korean offerings usually do not include opera.

[Dana John Hill]

For those who have these Korean boxes, are the track listings, at least,
in English?

[Herman]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:32:50 PM UTC+1, Dana John Hill wrote:


> For those who have these Korean boxes, are the track listings, at least,
>
> in English?
>

scary stuff.

[jrsnfld]

It's so easy to get practically any Solti recording, however. Why wait around for a box? Wouldn't you rather pick the ones you actually want?

--Jeff

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:33:31 PM UTC-5, Dana John Hill wrote:

> Nevertheless, even if he falls in esteem in every other respect, his (Solti's)

>
> reputation as a Wagnerian will surely keep his memory alive everywhere.

So, after 50 years of recording history, Solti will be remembered for the first recorded Ring Cycle.

Boy, he waved a lot of batons both before and after that cycle was finished. I accept that from time to time this or that is referenced for comparison purposes, but for a long time in NY his appearances were like Jesus coming back from the dead. He could do no wrong.

TD

[td]

And yours would appear to be working flawlessly.

What a dork!

TD

[td]

This is good to hear.

Frankly, I never see him referenced in the French, British or American record magazines, at least.

I heard him once in Urbana, Illinois, conduct the LSO on tour. He was simply fabulous! So dynamic. This was pre-Chicago, of course. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra.

TD

[td]

One would hope so. Translations from Korean to English is no easy trick. I had a Korean friend of mine do a translation for me once. He said it was very difficult.

TD

[td]

The most interesting would surely be his monaural Decca recordings. The stereos are probably easily available.

I once saw a massive 50(?) LP set in a fancy NY bookstore of all of Solti's recorded output to date. (That would be mid-1970s, I figure). Only ever spotted it once. Never seen another copy.

Anyway, now we are into boxed sets, Decca could easily assemble such a complete Solti edition. Perhaps for some anniverary? They missed his 100th birthday in 2012, however. If the boxed set craze continues, I can see such a set coming and now the Koreans have done it, surely London will catch on. Just look at how they leapt at that unsaleable Mexican series of forgotten singers.

TD

[Greg]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:11:35 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:
<snip>

>
> If your priorities don't include up-to-date sound or great playing or astute conducting, then yes, you might hesitate to agree with Osborne that Abbado deserves first consideration. I'm surprised that will all the fawning over British recordings, Osborne was able to acknowledge how good Abbado's cycle really is.
>
>
>
> -Jeff

I'm all for up-to-date sound, great playing, and astute conducting (all of which the Abbado has), but recommending it as the FIRST CHOICE strikes me as extremely uninspired. As if he had a quick deadline to hit, threw his hands up in the air, and just picked something central, well-done, and bland enough to be inoffensive. Blah. If he was charged with recommending the best car available at any price, I can only assume he would urge everyone to buy a mid-range beige Honda Accord. (A Civic for the second choice, for all the Alsop fans out there...) Does Osborne even like the piece?

Now that I'm done with Osborne, what are a few of your favorites for this symphony? Your lists always contain at least one or two good ones I haven't heard.

Greg

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:17:35 PM UTC-5, Greg wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:11:35 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >
>
> > If your priorities don't include up-to-date sound or great playing or astute conducting, then yes, you might hesitate to agree with Osborne that Abbado deserves first consideration. I'm surprised that will all the fawning over British recordings, Osborne was able to acknowledge how good Abbado's cycle really is.
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > -Jeff
>
>
>
> I'm all for up-to-date sound, great playing, and astute conducting (all of which the Abbado has), but recommending it as the FIRST CHOICE strikes me as extremely uninspired. As if he had a quick deadline to hit, threw his hands up in the air, and just picked something central, well-done, and bland enough to be inoffensive. Blah. If he was charged with recommending the best car available at any price, I can only assume he would urge everyone to buy a mid-range beige Honda Accord. (A Civic for the second choice, for all the Alsop fans out there...) Does Osborne even like the piece?

Astonished that one man's take on Brahms 3, of all pieces, should produce such senseless slams from the hoi polloi.

> Now that I'm done with Osborne,

You're "done" with Richard Osborne? Like he cares, really. I don't think you were engaged, were you?

> what are a few of your favorites for this symphony?

After your remarks about a respected critic's take on recordings of Brahms 3, do you really, like REALLY, think anyone is going to suggest anything? To you? Who wants you to poop all over them.

Better that YOU give your recommendations, so that we can all take joy in dumping onto your choices.

TD

[jrsnfld]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:17:35 PM UTC-8, Greg wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:11:35 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:

> > If your priorities don't include up-to-date sound or great playing or astute conducting, then yes, you might hesitate to agree with Osborne that Abbado deserves first consideration. I'm surprised that will all the fawning over British recordings, Osborne was able to acknowledge how good Abbado's cycle really is.
> > -Jeff

> I'm all for up-to-date sound, great playing, and astute conducting (all of which the Abbado has), but recommending it as the FIRST CHOICE strikes me as extremely uninspired. As if he had a quick deadline to hit, threw his hands up in the air, and just picked something central, well-done, and bland enough to be inoffensive. Blah. If he was charged with recommending the best car available at any price, I can only assume he would urge everyone to buy a mid-range beige Honda Accord. (A Civic for the second choice, for all the Alsop fans out there...) Does Osborne even like the piece?

I always thought of Osborne as Karajan's Divinely Appointed Representative on Earth, so I still can't get over the idea that he doesn't like Karajan's Brahms 3. Maybe he *doesn't* like the piece.

I haven't heard more than a few minutes of Alsop's Brahms, but it didn't do anything suggest anything better than a Civic. But we're all prone to looking for that special something nobody else knows about. Just because everybody and his mother drives an Accord doesn't mean it isn't (or wasn't, back in the day) pretty much the best car you could buy in most price categories that wasn't called "Camry". :-)

I mean, yeah, Ferrari is a "better" car, but trunk space, fuel economy, blah, blah...I need a Brahms 3 that will get me to the supermarket and back, that I can park on the street safely.

The Abbado/Berlin cycle is so obviously wonderful yet ubiquitous that we're bored with the very idea and horrified that we're picking what even a rank newbie would pick.

> Now that I'm done with Osborne, what are a few of your favorites for this symphony? Your lists always contain at least one or two good ones I haven't heard.

Thank you, but Brahms 3 isn't on my mind lately (listening to the piano quintet at this moment, however), so making a list is beyond me.

Of the people Osborne didn't list, I'd want to consider at least Schuricht, Solti, Abendroth, Ancerl, Monteux (live with the Concertgebouw), Barenboim, Dohnanyi, and Mravinsky. And I'd definitely ignore Osborne's opinions on a bunch of others. My hunch right now is that a live Karajan or Mravinsky would be at or near the top with Furtwangler. That's with utter disregard to sound quality as a factor.

--Jeff

[Greg]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:27:30 PM UTC-5, td wrote:
<snip>

>


>
> You're "done" with Richard Osborne? Like he cares, really. I don't think you were engaged, were you?
>
>
>

I lack the will to even respond to this.

>
>
> > what are a few of your favorites for this symphony?
>
>
>
> After your remarks about a respected critic's take on recordings of Brahms 3, do you really, like REALLY, think anyone is going to suggest anything? To you? Who wants you to poop all over them.
>

Yeah, I expect Jeff will probably list a few favorites since he is good about things like that and usually has interesting and thoughtful things to say. Maybe we will even get a real discussion going about different approaches to the piece or nuances that some appreciate and others haven't noticed, and I will be inspired to seek out a new recording or listen to an old one with fresh ears. You know, the kind of thing that used to happen in this group all the time...

>
>
> Better that YOU give your recommendations, so that we can all take joy in dumping onto your choices.
>
>
>
> TD

I already mentioned several I like. Dump away.

Greg

[Paul]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 1:04:24 PM UTC-8, Greg wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:27:30 PM UTC-5, td wrote:

>
> > You're "done" with Richard Osborne? Like he cares, really. I don't think you were engaged, were you?

> I lack the will to even respond to this.

There's no need, Greg. Everyone knows the guy is not only an asshole, but a meathead as well. He has more or less single-handedly ruined this newsgroup, which actually was pretty good before he graced us with his presence.

Paul Goldstein

[rapu...@spiritone.com]

One recording that probably would not be one anyone's list is Oivin Fjelstad/Oslo Philharmonic. Originally in the first Reader's Digest set and now available from ReDiscovery, it is a quick bracing performance in good sound

Stan Punzel

[Willem Orange]

I advise you and others to follow my four step program previously posted under "How to Handle Deacon". Since he feeds on negative postings and has no other life (so he isn't going anywhere), these steps will not stop him but will make your lives so much easier without having to put up with his childish nonsense. Try it -

1. I post anything I wish, wherever I wish and whenever I wish.

2. Deacon will whine, bitch, complain and call names.

3. I will NOT reply with similar insults but ignore them.

4. Repeat step one.

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:59:45 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:

> I haven't heard more than a few minutes of Alsop's Brahms, but it didn't do anything suggest anything better than a Civic. But we're all prone to looking for that special something nobody else knows about. Just because everybody and his mother drives an Accord doesn't mean it isn't (or wasn't, back in the day) pretty much the best car you could buy in most price categories that wasn't called "Camry".

You might also like the Hyundai Sonata, which is a best-seller, less money, and a real bargain.

As for the Ferrari, you can keep that, thank you. I don't have a mechanic on call and oodles of cash just to keep it going.

> The Abbado/Berlin cycle is so obviously wonderful yet ubiquitous that we're bored with the very idea and horrified that we're picking what even a rank newbie would pick.

That suggests that we, or some, are prone to snobbism. Not beyond the stretch of imagination, I think.

> > Now that I'm done with Osborne, what are a few of your favorites for this symphony? Your lists always contain at least one or two good ones I haven't heard.

> Thank you, but Brahms 3 isn't on my mind lately (listening to the piano quintet at this moment, however), so making a list is beyond me.

Ah, but he wanted real guidance, the kind that RO didn't offer. You know, the unknowns, unsung, unfindables? LOL.

> Of the people Osborne didn't list, I'd want to consider at least Schuricht, Solti, Abendroth, Ancerl, Monteux (live with the Concertgebouw), Barenboim, Dohnanyi, and Mravinsky. And I'd definitely ignore Osborne's opinions on a bunch of others.

I think you would have to be more specific, Jeff. You wish to ignore Barbirolli/VPO, Giulini/VPO or PO? At your peril, I would say. Or more charitably, your loss.

My hunch right now is that a live Karajan or Mravinsky would be at or near the top with Furtwangler.

I heard Karajan do all four Brahms symphonies in CH in the late 1970s or early 1980s. They were wonderful. But you really had to be there, see him, feel the magic of the moment. On CD I think the aura would vanish pretty quickly. Like, how can one forget Lauren Bacall with some rich Arab in the seat in front of me? Better than Brahms, I tell you. That is some neck!

Mravinsky? You have to like the Russian orchestral sound. I don't, at least not in Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. But I agree, he could be a very forceful advocate for the music.

TD

> That's with utter disregard to sound quality as a factor.

Never possible even today with inferior MP3 quality sound from downloads. People don't want mono, hell, they don't even want early stereo. They want DDD all the way, please.

So, Abbado is not a bad choice, all things considered.

TD

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:04:24 PM UTC-5, Greg wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:27:30 PM UTC-5, td wrote:

> > After your remarks about a respected critic's take on recordings of Brahms 3, do you really, like REALLY, think anyone is going to suggest anything? To you? Who wants you to poop all over them.
>
> Yeah, I expect Jeff will probably list a few favorites since he is good about things like that and usually has interesting and thoughtful things to say. Maybe we will even get a real discussion going about different approaches to the piece or nuances that some appreciate and others haven't noticed, and I will be inspired to seek out a new recording or listen to an old one with fresh ears. You know, the kind of thing that used to happen in this group all the time...

Why leave it to Jeff? Are you chopped liver? A know-nothing? A newbie? If you want a real discussion of nuances etc., (I don't, because nobody here can, although they think they can), you can start the discussion off yourself.

I really get the feeling that you're unwilling to slap your dick on the table and have it checked for size, so to speak. You want the info, but then also the ability to trash it if the mood strikes you.

> > Better that YOU give your recommendations, so that we can all take joy in dumping onto your choices.

> I already mentioned several I like. Dump away.

Like Levine? Chailly? (The piece is two years old, pre-Chailly. Or didn't you notice that?

That's two, but nothing to say about either of them in their defense.

I am waiting for the "nuances". You know, like in the old days of RMCR?

Come on, get with the programme.

TD

[td]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:32:21 PM UTC-5, Paul wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 1:04:24 PM UTC-8, Greg wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:27:30 PM UTC-5, td wrote:
>
>
>
> >
>
> > > You're "done" with Richard Osborne? Like he cares, really. I don't think you were engaged, were you?
>
>
>
> > I lack the will to even respond to this.
>
>
>
> There's no need, Greg. Everyone knows the guy is not only an asshole, but a meathead as well.

Perhaps. But you're as useless as tits on a bull, Pauly. We have known that for a very long time.

> He has more or less single-handedly ruined this newsgroup, which actually was > pretty good before he graced us with his presence.

I was going to say the same about you, Pauly, but I was too polite to point it out to you, as I know your fetish for saintly virtues. Get a grip. Stop griping. Start suggesting alternatives to those made by Richard Osborne. And don't forget to back them up with details and nuances, you know, the kind of thing that supposedly characterized this group before I graced it with my presence, as you put it.

TD

[td]

There are many steps to your salvation, Dicky.

1. Stop trolling. Man up.

2. Post when you have something to contribute that wouldn't be better in the opera group. (I am truly sorry - if not surprised - if they threw you out of that!)

3. And don't forget to keep your legs together and just say no. It worked for Nancy Reagan, so you can hope it works for you.

TD

[Bastian Kubis]

Great to read from you, Greg!

On 02/27/2014 04:26 PM, Greg wrote:
> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:36:17 AM UTC-5, Bastian Kubis wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> Can someone else comment on this Furtwängler recording? I don't know
>> the 1949 one. I have the M&A set that includes the 1954 3rd (and
>> additional recordings of the 1st and 4th); I always was under the
>> impression that Furtwängler connaisseurs valued that one higher. [Plus,
>> as much as I love Furtwängler in Brahms' other three symphonies, I never
>> thought he was particularly successful in the 3rd.]
>>
>> [I also need to check myself at some point whether Jochum's LPO version
>> really "is best of all", surpassing the wonderful Berlin version?!]
>>
>> Bastian
>
> Re: Furtwangler
> It's been a while, but I have heard both of them and came away
> thinking: (1) the 1954 was better, and (2) both can be safely
> ignored.

I'm much relieved. ;-)

> Re: Jochum
> I do think the LPO recording is a bit better than the BPO one for
> this symphony (but certainly not the other three). If I recall
> correctly, in the outer movements in the LPO recording Jochum
> employs some very effective rubato in key places, making for a
> particularly dramatic reading. What keeps it out of contention for me
> is the 3rd movement, which completely misses the mark imo.

I need to listen to the BPO one again. [I meant to say that I don't
actually *know* the LPO.] I have made a mental mark that I may consider
Jochum/BPO my favourite Brahms cycle overall, in the sense that there
are no real weaknesses there; and I remember liking the 3rd very much,
despiting it being quite different from what I would usually consider a
favourite... I need to listen again. Some time.

> Re: Gramophone/Osborne
> I suppose this is about what I would expect from this source. If you
> place every recording of this piece in a musical blender and average
> them all out, you would get something like Abbado/BPO, so that's
> obviously the first choice. (Not that it's a bad recording - it's
> very well played, reasonably dramatic, sensible, etc...)

Sums it up perfectly for me.

> If one finds Abbado too thrilling for one's delicate constitution,
> there's always Alsop,

Now *that* was really really mean.

> which has the added benefit of being played by the obviously
> unbeatable LPO. Throw in some lavish praise for completely
> forgettable recordings by Boult and Barbirolli. Praise the notably
> colorless Reiner recording for its color.

Yes, very weird. There are things about it that I like---Simon used to
praise i for its speed, which however yields to several others, I
think---but it's the lack of color precisely that prevented me from ever
really warming to it.

> Recommend the worst thing
> in Haitink's and Furtwangler's cycles. Totally ignore great modern
> recordings like Levine/VPO and Chailly/Leipzig.

I wanted to thank you for the Chailly/Leipzig recommendation that you
made around here months ago, and never managed because I wanted to
compare it to Gardiner first (someone asked about that specific
comparison), which I didn't find the time to do... anyway, Chailly was a
very pleasant surprise heard in isolation, even though I have not really
probed it next to other favourites.

Levine/VPO was my musical dinner companion tonight (which means: rather
casual listening...); and I was a bit disappointed. [I think both of
Levine's cycles are not quite as good on average as the two outstanding
1s are.] i is not fast/urgent enough; and no, I don't think either that
the "Toscanini mannerisms" are a good idea (or the starting F-F-F that
Osborne describes in the context of Koussevitzky). ii threatens to fall
apart in some places.

> Oh, and make sure to
> mention a few legitimately good and widely praised classic recordings
> like Klemperer, Walter, and Szell so as to not totally sacrifice all
> credibility. Yep, that's a Gramophone survey all right.

I hold it in his favour that, for my money, he gets the comparison
Walter '53 vs. Walter '60 exactly right (both are favourites, but
surprisingly I also ended up preferring the slightly slower, slightly
weighties remake when I compared them back-to-back some years ago;
*that's* the one that should be praised for its colours!). The Szell
from Amsterdam is /not/ the studio one on Decca (that I know), is it?

> And can anyone figure out which Toscanini recording Osborne is
> ragging on? He cites the RCA recording in the text, but lists the
> live Philharmonia recording on Testament in the selective discography
> (surely one of the greatest mono recordings of this piece).

As a description of the RCA recording, I don't find what he's writing
entirely implausible; so I assumed the text is right, and they put the
wrong reference at the bottom. [I'm not saying I perfectly understand
the lyrics, but then I'm not a native speaker.]

You have heard many more Brahms 3rds than I have, so I won't be able to
give you any new/interesting recommendations. Kempe/BPO and Rowicki
were pleasant surprises (with rather propulsive first movements), but I
guess that's as "exotic" as it gets in my book.

Bastian

[operafan]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:33:31 PM UTC-5, Dana John Hill wrote:
> I still read about Solti from time to time.

His Brahms symphonies with Chicago are really well performed, and I think his first Mahler 5 with CSO is a superb performance with excessively spotlighted engineering. One of his most outstanding recordings is the excerpts from Prokofiev Romeo & Juliet, also with Chicago.

[Frank Berger]

How hard is it to translate "Beethoven?""

[Greg]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 5:35:53 PM UTC-5, Bastian Kubis wrote:
<Snip>

> I need to listen to the BPO one again. [I meant to say that I don't
>
> actually *know* the LPO.] I have made a mental mark that I may consider
>
> Jochum/BPO my favourite Brahms cycle overall, in the sense that there
>
> are no real weaknesses there; and I remember liking the 3rd very much,
>
> despiting it being quite different from what I would usually consider a
>
> favourite... I need to listen again. Some time.

I like the BPO too, but I think the LPO is maybe a bit more interesting, at least in the outer movements.

>
> > If one finds Abbado too thrilling for one's delicate constitution,
>
> > there's always Alsop,
>
> Now *that* was really really mean.

Thank you. I try.

>
> I wanted to thank you for the Chailly/Leipzig recommendation that you
>
> made around here months ago, and never managed because I wanted to
>
> compare it to Gardiner first (someone asked about that specific
>
> comparison), which I didn't find the time to do... anyway, Chailly was a
>
> very pleasant surprise heard in isolation, even though I have not really
>
> probed it next to other favourites.
>
>

I would be surprised if you came away thinking they were in the same league. Chailly is much more sensitively phrased and structured to my ears. The Gardiner finale is pretty much a mad scramble, isn't it? I'm inclined to say Chailly is easily the best "fast" version I have heard. I find his sense of weight and color as well as his sensitivity to balances and long range drama remarkable at such quick speeds (in the outer movements anyway - the inner movements aren't notably fast). There are a couple of places where I would have lingered a bit more, but no recording is perfect, and this is as good as any.

One thing I appreciate about both of these is the attention given to the brass. I find myself looking for this more and more in this piece. Listen to the finale of Chailly or Gardiner (or Szell/Sony, also excellent in this regard) and compare with Abbado, paying particular attention to the horns and trombones relative the the strings. For me, the extra edge given by the brassier performances sounds much more dramatic than the smoother, more blended sound of most recordings, and also gives more opportunity for nuance to keep things interesting.

>
> Levine/VPO was my musical dinner companion tonight (which means: rather
>
> casual listening...); and I was a bit disappointed. [I think both of
>
> Levine's cycles are not quite as good on average as the two outstanding
>
> 1s are.] i is not fast/urgent enough; and no, I don't think either that
>
> the "Toscanini mannerisms" are a good idea (or the starting F-F-F that
>
> Osborne describes in the context of Koussevitzky). ii threatens to fall
>
> apart in some places.
>

I agree that the "Toscanini mannerism" in the opening bars is ill-advised, and that i would be better if it were faster. I also agree that it is not as cleanly played as some studio recordings, but I think Levine does provide quite a bit of dramatic contrast and makes one of the best cases I know for slow speeds in the first three movements. The finale is another with special attention given to the brass (and timpani - I recall it being one of the best in that regard). Again, not perfect, but compelling nonetheless in a fairly weak field.

>
> I hold it in his favour that, for my money, he gets the comparison
>
> Walter '53 vs. Walter '60 exactly right (both are favourites, but
>
> surprisingly I also ended up preferring the slightly slower, slightly
>
> weighties remake when I compared them back-to-back some years ago;
>
> *that's* the one that should be praised for its colours!). The Szell
>
> from Amsterdam is /not/ the studio one on Decca (that I know), is it?
>

Agree re: Walter's recordings; the stereo one is a favorite for lots of reasons. One thing I am not crazy about in Walter's recording is that he doesn't really lean into the central climax of the finale. It just sort of flies past without seeming like anything momentous is happening. Or so it seems to me. Jochum/LPO and Wand are really good at that point.

The Szell/Amsterdam is indeed the Decca recording. I prefer the Sony one, despite its slower pacing in the outer movements. Szell/Sony and Walter's stereo one are both examples of more sculpted readings of i, seeming faster than the timings indicate because they feature more contrast than normal for the pacing in the "fast" vs. "slow" material, which I find quite effective. The Szell is the subject of a lot of clueless commentary, as it doesn't conform to the lazy stereotype of Szell being excessively cold and driven if you actually bother listening to it. He really shines in the quieter moments - I don't think anyone is better in iii or the coda to the finale, for example.

>
> > And can anyone figure out which Toscanini recording Osborne is
>
> > ragging on? He cites the RCA recording in the text, but lists the
>
> > live Philharmonia recording on Testament in the selective discography
>
> > (surely one of the greatest mono recordings of this piece).
>
>
>
> As a description of the RCA recording, I don't find what he's writing
>
> entirely implausible; so I assumed the text is right, and they put the
>
> wrong reference at the bottom. [I'm not saying I perfectly understand
>
> the lyrics, but then I'm not a native speaker.]
>

I guess you are right. I first read the discography, then the text, so I initially thought he was referring the the Testament one, which doesn't sound anything like his description. I don't much care for the RCA one either, but if he was aware of the Philharmonia one, why didn't he talk about that one instead of the inferior one he hates? The Philharmonia performance strikes me as a model of pacing, phrasing, and dramatic structure, probably my favorite mono recording.

>
>
> You have heard many more Brahms 3rds than I have, so I won't be able to
>
> give you any new/interesting recommendations. Kempe/BPO and Rowicki
>
> were pleasant surprises (with rather propulsive first movements), but I
>
> guess that's as "exotic" as it gets in my book.

Kempe and Rowicki are indeed fast in the opening movement (as are Gielen and Leinsdorf/Philharmonia and Schuricht and Norrington and a few others I can't think of right now), but I think Chailly pretty much obviates the need to keep them around, since speed was the primary reason to consider them and Chailly provides not only that but much more.

Greg

[Greg]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:59:45 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:

>

> Thank you, but Brahms 3 isn't on my mind lately (listening to the piano quintet at this moment, however), so making a list is beyond me.
>

That's ok, I'll accept recommendations for the Piano Quintet instead :-). Anything better than Hough/Takacs? That's probably my go-to recording at the moment, though I don't think I can defend the choice, having only compared it to a handful of others.

Greg

[Paul]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 9:10:27 AM UTC-8, MINe109 wrote:
> On 2/27/14, 10:57 AM, Paul wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:14:50 AM UTC-8, MINe109 wrote:
>
> >
>
> >> The Alsop is still available for free on this collection:
>
> >
>
> >> http://www.amazon.com/Love-80s-Vol-1880s/dp/B002RHVBHU
>
> >
>
> > Unavailable, it seems. LOL.
>
>
>
> Sorry, I didn't check thoroughly enough! Thanks for the correction.

You're welcome. Klaus Heymann is a smart fellow. Why give the Alsop Brahms 3 away for free when it has just gotten such good publicity?

[ckho...@ckhowell.com]

Il giorno giovedì 27 febbraio 2014 22:46:06 UTC+1, rapu...@spiritone.com ha scritto:
> One recording that probably would not be one anyone's list is Oivin Fjelstad/Oslo Philharmonic. Originally in the first Reader's Digest set and now available from ReDiscovery, it is a quick bracing performance in good sound
>
>
>
> Stan Punzel

It's quick and bracing because it was transferred to LP a semitone sharp (there was a discussion on this a while ago). It's not especially quick once the pitch has been corrected (but I haven't heard the ReDiscovery transfer, maybe the pitch has been corrected). This is not to say it isn't good when heard at the right tempo and it might make it onto my list.
Another that "probably wouldn't be on anyone's list" but might get onto mine is the Ackermann (available from M. Gagnaux's "Mon Musée Musical"). I couldn't describe it as in "good sound" though.
Chris Howell

[td]

Easy.

It's the thousands of other words, I guess, that pose the problem. Can you grasp that, Frank? I know you have difficulty with complex problems and can only follow your nose through a discussion, but perhaps this much is possible?

Oh, those kids. ARGH!!!

TD

[td]

On Friday, February 28, 2014 3:38:51 AM UTC-5, ckho...@ckhowell.com wrote:
> Il giorno giovedì 27 febbraio 2014 22:46:06 UTC+1, rapu...@spiritone.com ha scritto:
>
> > One recording that probably would not be one anyone's list is Oivin Fjelstad/Oslo Philharmonic. Originally in the first Reader's Digest set and now available from ReDiscovery, it is a quick bracing performance in good sound
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Stan Punzel
>
>
>
> It's quick and bracing because it was transferred to LP a semitone sharp (there was a discussion on this a while ago). It's not especially quick once the pitch has been corrected (but I haven't heard the ReDiscovery transfer, maybe the pitch has been corrected). This is not to say it isn't good when heard at the right tempo and it might make it onto my list.

That would alter the tempo by 6%.

So, in a 10:00 minute movement, this would mean the movement would be 20" longer.

One has to wonder whether, without knowing in advance, this change in tempo would be noticed by the average listener.

In any event it hardly turns an Allegro into a Largo, I think. From one concert to the other Mr. Fjelstad could easily have made such alterations to his basic tempo without altering the music significantly.

TD

[Gerard]

"Frank Berger" wrote in message
news:NfidnXqR7qnWVZLO...@supernews.com...

=================

Not hard. What about translating "Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der
Ankunft auf dem Lande".

[FrankB]

That would mean the movement would be 36" longer, not 20". To put it another way, the oboe would "tune" to 466 in the sharp version. And yes, it would be noticeable.

[MELMOTH]

Ce cher mammifère du nom de Oscar nous susurrait, le jeudi 27/02/2014,
dans nos oreilles grandes ouvertes mais un peu sales tout de même, et
dans le message
<4646a395-a79c-4008...@googlegroups.com>, les doux
mélismes suivants :

> << Brahms Symphony No 3: which recording is best?

*Monteux*, of course...(BPO)...
*Klemperer*...
*Kubelik* (Vienna)...
*Mravinsky*...
*Abbado* (BPO)...

--
Car avec beaucoup de science, il y a beaucoup de chagrin ; et celui qui
accroît sa science accroît sa douleur.
[Ecclésiaste, 1-18]
MELMOTH - souffrant

[ckho...@ckhowell.com]

It's not so much a question of tempo, the music breathes naturally when the proper pitch has been restored, it sounded breathless on the old Reader's Digest LP. The tempo that emerges at the higher pitch isn't untenable in itself, but somehow tempo and phrasing don't match because it isn't the tempo that was actually played.
Chris Howell

[ckho...@ckhowell.com]

Anyway, I've just checked the beginning of the ReDiscovery transfer and the pitch is right. So the issue is, is it a good performance?
Chris Howell

[td]

The pitch yes, particularly to a trained ear. But perhaps only on direct comparison.

The tempo? Hmmmm. Not so sure, actually.

TD

[Alan Cooper]

jrsnfld <jrs...@aol.com> wrote in
news:dd4ccc54-8c49-4491...@googlegroups.com:

> Of the people Osborne didn't list, I'd want to consider at least
> Schuricht, Solti, Abendroth, Ancerl, Monteux (live with the
> Concertgebouw), Barenboim, Dohnanyi, and Mravinsky. And I'd definitely
> ignore Osborne's opinions on a bunch of others. My hunch right now is
> that a live Karajan or Mravinsky would be at or near the top with
> Furtwangler. That's with utter disregard to sound quality as a factor.

Nice to see mention of Mravinsky, but if you want to hear a much better
(imo, obviously) Soviet performance of the work, I'd recommend Eliasberg on
Vista Vera. The coupled Oistrakh/Knushevitsky/Eliasberg Brahms Double
Concerto is superb as well. Eliasberg is always great in Brahms (Violin
Concerto w/Kogan, a live Symphony #4, supposedly also German Requiem
although I can't stand the work), and he is generally worth hearing in
anything.

Has anyone mentioned the live Mitropoulos Brahms 3rd formerly available on
ASDisc? Terrific for three movements and but let down by a draggy fourth.

AC

[Edward A. Cowan]

Re: Hyundai Sonata. I have seen a few examples of that car. I sometimes wonder why Hyundai did not try other music-derived names, such as "Passacaglia", "Divertimento", or some other musical term. I suspect we won't see one called "Allegro ma non troppo". <g> --E.A.C. (And as for "Adagio con brio", well...

[Edward A. Cowan]

On Thursday, February 27, 2014 5:20:42 PM UTC-6, Frank Berger wrote:

> How hard is it to translate "Beethoven?""

I can only guess how "hard" it is to do that. In Japanese writing, the name appears as " ベートーヴュン " on the back of the LP jacket for Jap. Philips Fontana SFON-10602(M), Beethoven Sym. no. 7 in A Major, Concertgebouw, cond. W. Mengelberg. (I'm not certain about the last three characters in the Japanese rendering of "Beethoven" (" ヴュン "), as the Character viewer of my Mac gives a rendering that does not match the third syllable of Beethoven's name. FWIW, the long dashes in the Japanese version indicate extra-long vowel sounds in the first two syllables. (Info from P. G. O'Neill, _Essential Kanji_, New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1973.) Since I do not speak Japanese (my foreign languages are German and French), I can only guess at the accuracy of the characters given above. Any corrections appreciated! --E.A.C.

[MiNe109]

There's the Accent and the Kia Forte.

Stephen

[jrsnfld]

On Friday, February 28, 2014 3:52:03 AM UTC-8, MELMOTH wrote:

> > << Brahms Symphony No 3: which recording is best?

> *Monteux*, of course...(BPO)...

What label is that on?

--Jeff

[Alan Cooper]

jrsnfld <jrs...@aol.com> wrote in news:b9c96864-4806-4979-b6c9-
38efe5...@googlegroups.com:

I was about to write "Tahra," but that's with the Concertgebouw, not BPO.
Good but not special, imo. There's also the BBC Northern performance on
BBC Legends, and I dimly recall that an earlier NY Phil performance has
been in circulation on and off. Others? I'm no expert on the Monteux
discography, but the only BPO recording that comes immediately to mind is
the live concert that was issued on Testament.

AC

[jrsnfld]

On Friday, February 28, 2014 12:57:33 PM UTC-8, Alan Cooper wrote:

> >> > << Brahms Symphony No 3: which recording is best?

> >> *Monteux*, of course...(BPO)...

> > What label is that on?

> I was about to write "Tahra," but that's with the Concertgebouw, not BPO.
> Good but not special, imo. There's also the BBC Northern performance on
> BBC Legends, and I dimly recall that an earlier NY Phil performance has
> been in circulation on and off. Others? I'm no expert on the Monteux
> discography, but the only BPO recording that comes immediately to mind is
> the live concert that was issued on Testament.

Thanks--I didn't know about the Testament disc. No Brahms 3, alas--that BP/Monteux version remains an enigma. I re-listened to the Concertgebouw performance last night--good, indeed. Special, maybe. Not the top of the heap. By contrast Kempe/BP flows with ever more natural, unassuming assurance, plus he's got that racing pulse where necessary in the first movement. Kempe's also great with a light touch on the sonorities that allows superb clarity from everyone involved. That's near the top--just a little too "blank" interpretive in some key places, especially the second movement. It's a great 3, and makes me want to hear Kempe/Munich again soon.

Not sure I care to hear the Monteux/BBC performance--I've contemplated buying it many times but felt satisfied with the Concertgebouw disc.

--Jeff

[rapu...@spiritone.com]

To answer, IMHO, yes. When I first heard the ReDiscovery transfer, I was really taken with the performance. The faster tempo in the 1st mvt made a difference as I had always liked Reiner.

[jrsnfld]

On Friday, February 28, 2014 6:17:16 AM UTC-8, Alan Cooper wrote:

>
> Nice to see mention of Mravinsky, but if you want to hear a much better
> (imo, obviously) Soviet performance of the work, I'd recommend Eliasberg on
> Vista Vera. The coupled Oistrakh/Knushevitsky/Eliasberg Brahms Double
> Concerto is superb as well. Eliasberg is always great in Brahms (Violin
> Concerto w/Kogan, a live Symphony #4, supposedly also German Requiem
> although I can't stand the work), and he is generally worth hearing in
> anything.

I think I've heard only one Eliasberg recording and it was indeed excellent. I haven't heard the Brahms symphonies. Mravinsky is a special breed, though, not easily displaced in my pantheon.

> Has anyone mentioned the live Mitropoulos Brahms 3rd formerly available on
> ASDisc? Terrific for three movements and but let down by a draggy fourth.

I'll have to listen to the whole 3rd again (I'm assuming it's the same as the one on Arkadia). Outside the great Brahms PC1 with Kapell (enough to establish his credentials), I remember that 3rd as Mitropoulos's best Brahms. Relistening to the last movement only, I hear what you mean, but I like it anyway. It doesn't drag, but it is determined to dwell and ponder. Not excesssively, but enough to shake the listener out of the "holy cow, this is thrilling stuff!" mode that prevails in the first three movements.

--Jeff

[MELMOTH]

Ce cher mammifère du nom de jrsnfld nous susurrait, le vendredi
28/02/2014, dans nos oreilles grandes ouvertes mais un peu sales tout

de même, et dans le message

<b9c96864-4806-4979...@googlegroups.com>, les doux
mélismes suivants :

> What label is that on?

Private one !...(with BSO...And Brahms symphonies 1 to 4 !)...

[Alex Brown]

On 28/02/2014 11:52, MELMOTH wrote:

> *Monteux*, of course...(BPO)...
> *Klemperer*...
> *Kubelik* (Vienna)...
> *Mravinsky*...
> *Abbado* (BPO)...
>

I (also) like Mackerras (Scottish CO) - the big first movement repeat
feels just right in this recording, and the relative wind/brass
prominence throughout is convincing.

[Alan Cooper]

MELMOTH <th...@free.fr> wrote in news:mn.0a427de39c...@free.fr:

> Ce cher mammifère du nom de jrsnfld nous susurrait, le vendredi
> 28/02/2014, dans nos oreilles grandes ouvertes mais un peu sales tout
> de même, et dans le message
> <b9c96864-4806-4979...@googlegroups.com>, les doux
> mélismes suivants :
>
>> What label is that on?
>
> Private one !...(with BSO...And Brahms symphonies 1 to 4 !)...

Ah, BSO makes a lot more sense than BPO! Monteux rehearses the orchestra
in part of the opening movement of the Brahms 3rd in a broadcast that is
available on line: http://pastdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/Boston-Symphony-Monteux-Rehearsal-Feb.-5-1951.mp3
at about 18:00 (preceded by the Flying Dutchman Overture). Great
listening, and the rehearsal makes me wish I could hear the whole
performance! BSO performances of ##1 and 4 are included in the set of
all four symphonies conducted by Monteux on Memories (which I do not
own), but #3 in that set is the NY Phil performance that I mentioned in
my previous post.

AC

[Fred]

On Thursday, 27 February 2014 04:02:48 UTC, Oscar wrote:
> Oddly, James Levine's excellent 1994 recording w/ VPO is not listed in the 'select' discography. One of my fave 'modern' versions.
>
>
>
> From gramophone.co.uk http://tinyurl.com/l9sddg8
>

There's a live Klemperer performance from 1957 RFH with Philharmonia that I believe eclipses the studio version. Maybe it's now on testament? Certainly has been doing the rounds on budget collections for a while now.

[Terry]

In article <923877e9-2b6d-47bd...@googlegroups.com>,

But that "Figaro", it's really something, isn't it? A superb recording!

[Terry]

In article <ab96312c-b109-4b45...@googlegroups.com>,
operafan <peter....@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:33:31 PM UTC-5, Dana John Hill wrote:
> > I still read about Solti from time to time.
>

> His Brahms symphonies with Chicago are really well performed, and I think his
> first Mahler 5 with CSO is a superb performance with excessively spotlighted
> engineering. One of his most outstanding recordings is the excerpts from
> Prokofiev Romeo & Juliet, also with Chicago.

Interesting. I found that Romeo and Juliet recording hard-driven, and
the recording very shallow and glassy. I still have it around the place
somewhere, I should listen to it again.

[Terry]

In article <a28d95f9-88c6-4863...@googlegroups.com>,
Greg <onei...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:11:35 PM UTC-5, jrsnfld wrote:
> <snip>
> >
> > If your priorities don't include up-to-date sound or great playing or
> > astute conducting, then yes, you might hesitate to agree with Osborne that
> > Abbado deserves first consideration. I'm surprised that will all the
> > fawning over British recordings, Osborne was able to acknowledge how good
> > Abbado's cycle really is.
> >
> >
> >
> > -Jeff
>
> I'm all for up-to-date sound, great playing, and astute conducting (all of
> which the Abbado has), but recommending it as the FIRST CHOICE strikes me as
> extremely uninspired. As if he had a quick deadline to hit, threw his hands
> up in the air, and just picked something central, well-done, and bland enough
> to be inoffensive. Blah. If he was charged with recommending the best car
> available at any price, I can only assume he would urge everyone to buy a
> mid-range beige Honda Accord. (A Civic for the second choice, for all the
> Alsop fans out there...) Does Osborne even like the piece?
>
> Now that I'm done with Osborne, what are a few of your favorites for this
> symphony? Your lists always contain at least one or two good ones I haven't heard.
>
> Greg

Boult, Klemperer, Jochum and (even though he dismisses it) Gardiner.

[Willem Orange]

That it is - wonderfully cast from top to bottom with superb conducting

[Daniel Pyle]

I know that I am two years late to this conversation, but I would like to put in a word for one of my favorites -- (on DVD) Semyon Bychkov with the WDR SO. It does not displace my other favorites (Barbirolli, Boult, Karajan live, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Szell, Ormandy), but it does deserve recognition, I think.

Daniel