Prom 49: Saturday 20th August at 7.30 p.m. (Brahms/Haitink 2)

[salymap]

From the horse's mouth though am51. How are you these days?

[marvin]

Actually, the performance of the 2nd concerto does not bear too many repeats as there are a few issues and wrong notes which are more apparent each time you listen. I know this can't be helped in live performances. Perhaps EA was ill advised to do both concertos on consecutive nights?

[Norfolk Born]

I believe that Daniel Barenboim played them both on the same evening in 2002, with Zubin Mehta conducting.

[Chris Newman]

Just got back from four days in London having felt honoured to hear so much fine Brahms playing particularly from Emanual Ax, Bernard Haitink and the superb European Chamber Orchestra. So refreshing to hear this music with the brown varnish scraped away and the colours glowing. Bed calls.

[gradus]

Plainly these were greatly enjoyed performances but I'm afraid I prefer my Brahms 4 with more drama, more weight from the orchestra and more bite to the performance. Oh well chacun.....perhaps tonight's Brahms 1 will be more up my street.

[gradus]

Er, not tonight.

[amateur51]

From the horse's mouth though am51. How are you these days?

I'm doing fine ta, salymap, having discovered that paracetamol + ibuprofen works wonders on my joints, esp my feet

Aaaah the joys of self-medication

How are you doing, saly?

[bluestateprommer]

Actually, the performance of the 2nd concerto does not bear too many repeats as there are a few issues and wrong notes which are more apparent each time you listen. I know this can't be helped in live performances. Perhaps EA was ill advised to do both concertos on consecutive nights?

One wonders, since obviously the situation at The Proms, where each concert is a one-off (as is the case with regular season concerts with UK orchestras, to my limited understanding), differs from the regular US symphony subscription system in that a given concerto soloist will perform the same piece on 2 consecutive nights (sometimes even 3). Of course, in situations like that, it's the same concerto on consecutive evenings, rather than trying to play 2 different big-scale concertos on successive nights, as Ax did here. All this preface is by way of some understanding of marvin's POV, where maybe in this case, both Brahms concerti on successive nights were perhaps a bit much. However, in fairness to Ax, I've seen him in concert where he played 2 different, albeit shorter, concertante works on the same evening, with no problems. Maybe also he tried to compensate for being in the RAH, as opposed to a smaller venue like Carnegie or Symphony Hall Boston. Whatever the case, the passages of wrong notes here and there definitely made this the lesser performance compared to Brahms 1 the previous evening, again as heard through iPlayer. However, Haitink and the COE were on splendid form in the concerto, IMHO.

Likewise in the Symphony No. 4, I found this a finer overall rendition than their Brahms 3 the night before, strong and confident from the get-go, although with 20/20 hindsight, one wonders if this had to do with the symphony being in the 2nd half for the second Brahms concert, as opposed to Brahms 3 being in the 1st half the night before. Granted, as I mentioned in the other thread, I got into BH's spirit of his treatment of Brahms 3 by the end of it. It turns out that I personally prefer #3 to #4. But still, for Brahms aficionados, one can't complain about the mini-festival offerings those two nights.

[Chris Newman]

It is interesting to read the various yea and nay comments on the Brahms concerts over the last few days as I went to both Haitink/Ax/CEO concerts, the BBCSSO/Manze concert and the Dausgaard/BBCSO concert. I agree with bluestateprommer that each concert should be taken as a one-off. Brahms won on each occasion. The Haitink concerts were remarkable for their clarity and cleansing of the palate especially the second concert which had much more fire. The Manze with Schoenberg's delightfully souped up version of the Piano Quartet was a perfect sandwich filler for the Haitink bread and butter (forgive the awful mixed metaphor). Then Dausgaard reminded us of how we often hear Brahms but he won us over by putting a lot more oomph and imagination into the proceedings which overcame the indigestion that big sounding Brahms can regularly yield.