BRAHMS: Ich schwing mein Horn ins Jammertal; Es toent ein voller Harfenklang; Nachtwache I; Einforrmig ist der Liebe Gram; Gesang der Parzen, Op. 89; Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90; Naenie, Op. 82 – Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique/The Monteverdi Choir/John Eliot Gardiner – Soli Deo Gloria SDG 704, 70:16 **** [Distr. by Harmonia mundi]:
Conductor John Eliot Gardiner has compiled (16 November 2007; 4-8 October 2008) a fascinating, if somber, color portrait of Brahms, one that embraces his choral work and his Third Symphony as extensions of an ethos much concerned with fate, loss, and mortality. The opening a cappella song for male chorus, Op. 41, No. 1 (1871), “I wind my horn in this vale of tears,” announces the poet’s obsession with waning powers. From 1860, we hear a favorite acoustic combination in Brahms–harp and French horn–“The full sound of a harp rings out,” Op. 17, No. 1, whose last words from Ruperti, “My life is lost!” yield to that Dionysian wisdom of which Silenus is the spokesman. The mixed a cappella song, Night-Watch I, Op. 104, No. 1 (1889) from Rueckert tries to find consolation for absent love. The medieval sonority of plaintive motet-style becomes haunted as well as haunting. “Love’s grief is monotonous” (1891), Op. 113, No. 13 for a cappella female chorus in Schubertian counterpoint, achieves a paradoxical whimsy in the midst of bewailing the “einsamer” sensibility that saturates Brahms.
The magnificent sound of the orchestral timbre that opens The Song of the Fates (1882), after Goethe, includes a mixed chorus who incant their fear of the feasting gods who hurl men to their deaths without interrupting their own perpetual revel. The music is fraught with sighs, blasts, and headlong descents, a motif that scares us to death in the (not included) Schicksalslied, Op. 54. The theme of Nature’s indifference hearkens both to King Lear and to Stephen Crane, to an antique modality in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and to the bitonal world about to burst forth from Schoenberg.
The Brahms Third, now set in this existential context, assumes a decidedly autumnal aura, especially as Gardiner has his winds and strings attentive to staccati and “seufzend” (sighing) markings in the score, the use of short bow phrasings to reduce the romance in the first movement, which does take the repeat. The waltz that eventually emerges from the main motto carries a ghostly entourage, the French horn here suggesting a tearful contemplation of Paradise Lost. The tension of F Major/F minor, given its new transparency, reveals its painful ambiguities clearly. The coda then becomes exactly that headlong onrush to Judgment of one whose capacity to love has been severely questioned. Brahms has met Kafka head on, and their handshake still feels dampened with tears.
The C Major Andante feels a chill wind passing through its melancholy figures, a sense of desperation in the low winds and horns more than once paying homage to sad strains in Schubert. The C Minor Poco Allegretto finds kinship more in Ein deutsches Requiem than in some contemporary love-song from Op. 65. A ghostly reminiscence, the music renders up bare vistas and bitter-sweet disappointments. The middle section, here played with a skittish and demure affect, suggests the pitiless emptiness of eternal spaces. Even the French horn offers grim consolation, as Remarque writes, “The stars are cold.” Sighs in the winds and strings only confirm the enervated state of Nature, a nod to T.S. Eliot. The last movement explodes with defiance to one’s destiny, the cross rhythms rife with portent. A manic energy seizes the fate motif, more the convulsions and subsequent parodies of a prolonged death-rattle. The final bars turn in on themselves to the opening, a tragic orobouros. Has oblivion become that “consummation devoutly to be wished”?
A mournful oboe melody begins the Naenie (1881, after Schiller), a plaint equal to the opening of the Violin Concerto’s second movement. The words, “Even Beauty must perish!” disabuses our dearest aesthetic sensibility as Orpheus himself is denied reunion with his wife and maenads rend him. Achilles falls despite his mother’s intervention. Female voices attempt to bring Nereus’ daughters up from the sea, so even the gods might weep to see Love and Perfection fade. What is a musician’s greatest fear?–to have become a forgotten sound.
— Gary Lemco
