Brahms Nos. 1 and 3

Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Concertgebouw Orchestra conclude their Brahms cycle in grandiose fashion with all four symphonies spread over two evenings - in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Luxembourg. The British conductor aims to strip Brahms’s works of their sometimes overly serious, ‘heavy’ image – as with the First Symphony, which the composer completed only after years of toil. All the same, Gardiner speaks of the work’s ‘incitement to dance’ and of its ever-shifting, ear-tickling rhythms. In the Third Symphony, Gardiner hears the echoes of Brahms’s chamber music, pointing to the ‘seductive clarinet’ in the first movement, and ‘the intimacy of the dialogue between individual instruments’. In this way, Gardiner places Brahms’s well-known symphonies in a completely new and fresh context. And that’s what he says it’s all about: a Brahms ‘for our time’.