BRAHMS Symphony No 2. Tragic Overture
Second volume of Young’s Hamburg Brahms cycle
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Johannes Brahms
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: Oehms
Magazine Review Date: 09/2012
Media Format: Super Audio CD
Media Runtime: 57
Mastering:
Stereo
DDD
Catalogue Number: OC676
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Symphony No. 2 |
Johannes Brahms, Composer
Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra Johannes Brahms, Composer Simone Young, Conductor |
Tragic Overture |
Johannes Brahms, Composer
Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra Johannes Brahms, Composer Simone Young, Conductor |
Author: Peter Quantrill
Try the span of the slow movement’s opening melody (all 1'20" of it): you can’t teach this stuff but it’s an object lesson in what Furtwängler saw as the hardest achievement of all, the creation of a genuine legato. Knappertsbusch used to do Brahms in this way: roughly hewn, brushing doubts aside, unsurprisingly north German, and no less authentic than Viennese or Meiningen-influenced perspectives offered recently by Mariss Jansons and Andrew Manze respectively.
The gossamer lightness of the pizzicatos in the Scherzo is perhaps exaggerated by a balance in which a solo flute can sound louder than a string section, and the finale is long on exhilaration but short on clarity (it takes Carlos Kleiber and the VPO, or Jochum and the BPO, to make sense of such a tempo), though none of the slips are as destabilising as the nasty slippage 0'50" into the opening of the First Symphony. The Tragic Overture, less fallibly played but also less surely proportioned, completes a fine release.
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