The Brahms Experience

[teamsaint]

Just discovered there are now two threads - mea culpa, Das Fleisch ist nur Grass etc - so I've asked FF to intervene.

kb

oh, shame.

The multiple threads approach is great fun, and working really well on new releases.

[french frank]

Brahms Experience all kicking off, as we say, tomorrow
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p024q7l3

Threads merged. Sorry, team. I was asked ...

[EdgeleyRob]

Can't wait for the Kenneth Leighton Experience.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I am never too sure of these composer focus programmes of Radio 3. It smacks of cheap programming.

Why havn't R3done a Richard Strauss Season, like this?

I think you may be sending mixed messages, Bbm.

[french frank]

Why havn't R3done a Richard Strauss Season, like this?

I thought they had ...

[Tevot]

Can't wait for the Kenneth Leighton Experience.

I once had a Kenneth Williams Experience - and have never been the same since

Looking forward to hearing the Brahms programmes (he is a favourite of mine) but I will agree with others who would like the BBC to advocate neglected composers via this format.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[kernelbogey]

oh, shame.

The multiple threads approach is great fun, and working really well on new releases.

Despite checking whether there was one, I missed it and started a second. Hope you'll still have fun here, TS.

[teamsaint]

Despite checking whether there was one, I missed it and started a second. Hope you'll still have fun here, TS.

Thanks KB, fun is never a problem when the are 3 threads for new releases.

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?12076-In-the-pipeline-(info-re-forthcoming-releases)

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?1534-New-releases-FOR-3-reviewed

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?1534-New-releases

or is it 4.......

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?12074-A-place-for-our-reviews-of-New-Releases

anyway splendid reviews, from Barbi, Jayne et al, most useful with Xmas round the corner.......

anyway, back to the Brahms thing..........

[P. G. Tipps]

Personally, though, the harmonic invention of R Strauss, is highly original and this is why I love this composer.

Hear, Hear, Brassbandmaestro!

R Strauss is one of my favourites also. Funnily enough, Brahms continues to leave me cold and I guess I'll never get the hang of his music now. I find it just so ... well, uninspiring, really.

Marin Alsop, the conductress, was on Desert Island Discs this morning and she said it was Brahms String Sextet in B flat Major, which she heard as a small child, that left her entranced and started her love for classical music.

Hearing that sort of passion for Johannes's music makes one's "deaf-spot" all the more maddening.

I'll keep trying, though!

[ahinton]

It's funny, BBM, but, as with Liszt, (who exercised I think a not inconsiderable influence on R Strauss), I tend to go with those influenced one way or another by them - preferring Franck, Saint-Saens, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Busoni for what they managed to do with Liszt's innovations in form, harmony and orchestration; and in Strauss's case what Szymanowsky, Elgar and Bartok made out of his harmonic sense.

I'm with you here, but...

In Liszt's case it's the ofttimes downright banality in some of the themes and the way this is thrown at the listener; and in that of Strauss a similar self-regarding pomposity.

I would argue that cases such as these are rather more the exception than the rule.

I also agree with Maurice Ohana in finding Strauss's scores too full of cholesterol

Whereas I find that his have almost none, which is quite dangerous! (and I recall the shee extent of his contempt for Strauss as evidenced in the way he used to pronounce his name "Straws"). What's important about cholesetrol is not just the overall level thereof but also the balance between LDL and HDL; sufficient imbalance between what's colloquially known as "good" and "bad" cholesterol can be at least as dangerous as an overall level that's too high or too low. As in health, so in music. I think that even Busoni, whose view of Strauss was generally pretty negative (apart from his wild enthusiasm for one of his greatest works, Salome which he described as "a throw of genius") would have recognised this aspect because, when he complained about Strauss first writing the principal voice, then the principal bass voice then filling in all the principal middle voices, he then prceeded to undo his neat jobe by praising Strauss the conductor, from which one can only conclude that Busoni accepted at the same time that Strauss knew as well as anyone just how best to balance all of those voices, thereby maintaining a healthy cholesterol (orchesterol?) balance!

Schoenberg who said words to the effect that "Whatever I learned from Strauss" - and I guess he was speaking of harmonic inquisitiveness - "I quickly unlearned".

Which simply isn't true, actually (and how oddly prophetic - albeit in a subtly restrained menner - his rarely heard Op. 8 songs are of Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder from some 40 years later!); I suspect that Schönberg's comment may in part have been a delayed reaction to Strauss's notorious unforgivably tasteless insult to him (whom he'd earlier championed) about shovelling snow...

[ahinton]

I once had a Kenneth Williams Experience - and have never been the same since

We won't ask!...

[ahinton]

R Strauss is one of my favourites also.

And mine.

Funnily enough, Brahms continues to leave me cold and I guess I'll never get the hang of his music now. I find it just so ... well, uninspiring, really.

I'm not at all with you there; there are certain works that do little for me but not so very many.

Marin Alsop, the conductress

Don't you dare let her hear you write that!

was on Desert Island Discs this morning and she said it was Brahms String Sextet in B flat Major, which she heard as a small child, that left her entranced and started her love for classical music.

Hearing that sort of passion for Johannes's music makes one's "deaf-spot" all the more maddening.

I'll keep trying, though!

Well, maybe try the other and even finer sextet, in G - or the second piano trio or the piano quintet or indeed any of the three piano quartets if chamber music might be a way in for you.

[P. G. Tipps]

Well, maybe try the other and even finer sextet, in G - or the second piano trio or the piano quintet or indeed any of the three piano quartets if chamber music might be a way in for you.

Many thanks, ahinton, for pointing me in another direction which is always greatly appreciated, especially from a composer.

If the symphonies have singularly failed to stir my hopefully just slumbering Brahmsian soul then maybe the chamber works just might?

[jayne lee wilson]

When I see the word "conductress" I reach for my... bus fare. 4p. Last time I heard the word I was still at school...

But, PGT (terrible affliction, my sympathies), what about the Brahms Serenades? Full of Brahmsian soul and with lighter moods than in the symphonies. I've loved them not wisely but too well, almost used them up.. Very loveable music, do try them. My best-loved is Mackerras with the SCO on Telarc.

The Serenades should be on next week, not the Academic Borefest and the 1st Symphony...

[kernelbogey]

I've just come back from hearing the Bournemouth SO under Karabits give a beautifully lyrical and crisp performance of Brahms 1. (And a wonderful LvB Pno Concerto 1 with Robert Levin - who amazed us with improvised cadenzas.)

Reverting to Brahms - I adore the sextets, the Horn trio and all the Piano/Strings chamber music.

Tom Service, in the less-than-usually-irritating trailer for the BE, says we need to connect with Brahms's passion. I think this is downplayed (and hence he's 'beery and stodgy' to some) partly because (to repeat myself) he's conventionally portrayed like an Old Testament prophet or perhaps Kapellmeister with that beard worthy of an Edward Lear poem. There was plenty of passion early on. (Not to be beardist, of course: beards do not per se inhibit passion....)