by Ben Hogwood Image unknown credit, used courtesy of Wikipedia
On this day 150 years ago, the first performance of Brahms’s Symphony no.1 in C minor took place in Karlsruhe, under the baton of his friend Felix Otto Dessoff.
Just four days after the premiere of his lesser known String Quartet no.3, Brahms crossed a significant threshold in his life with the first airing of his foray into the symphony. It was a fraught process, for Brahms felt the hand of Beethoven on his shoulder, creating a pressure he found almost impossible to evade. With a self critical approach it was a long while before the symphony appeared, but the universal verdict is that it was well worth the wait!
From its grand, darkly shaded introduction, the symphony demands and keeps the listener’s attention throughout. The tautly argued first movement is followed by a slow movement of Autumnal beauty, then an Intermezzo that flows easily, with a soft clarinet solo. The finale is perhaps the most indebted to Beethoven, adopting a similar ‘darkness to light’ journey of the Choral symphony, but Brahms’s themes and their development are original. The final chorale feels like a deserved victory.
You can listen to the symphony in one of my favourite recordings below, with the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Claudio Abbado:
Published post no.3,068 – Wednesday 4 November 2026
by Ben Hogwood Image unknown credit, used courtesy of Wikipedia
On this day 150 years ago, the first performance of Brahms’s Third String Quartet took place in Berlin.
It is the lesser known of the three published Brahms quartets, but has a certain Autumnal beauty and lightness ideal for this time of year.
It was dedicated to cellist Professor Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann, and published just before his Symphony no.1. You can enjoy a performance of the quartet below, given by the Castalian Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in 2020:
Zlatomir Fung (cello), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Ariane Matiakh
Debussy Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894) Osborn Sun Sundered Head (2026) [World Premiere] Brahms Symphony no.1 in C minor Op.68 (1876)
Cadogan Hall, London Wednesday 21 October 2026
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest concert at Cadogan Hall paired two very different classics, just 18 years apart, with a new work by one of the UK’s most significant younger composers and what proved a notable debut with this orchestra by one of France’s leading conductors.
Laurence Osborn’s profile has grown incrementally this past decade and Sun SunderedHead is among his most significant premieres. Inspired by one of Guillaume Apollinaire’s typically oblique poems, the trajectory of his nocturne for cello and orchestra (to quote the composer) ‘‘from dusk, to the dead of night, to dawn’’ is one of a mounting anticipation and dissipating activity, to a central cadenza that is eventful for all its inwardness, then rapidly accumulating energy as makes ever more virtuosic demands before the most heart-stopping of conclusions.
The sheer intricacy and dexterity of orchestral writing would be a challenge for any soloist to negotiate, but from which Zlatomir Fung duly emerged with keen appreciation of his being a focal-point in proceedings. Music, moreover, that reinforces Osborn’s involvement with the musical past as often provocative while always engaging to a degree communicated to those present. Following on from the TOMB!, the first album dedicated to this work, this has been an auspicious year for a composer with a great deal to say and resourceful ways of saying it.
Something similar may well have been said about Debussy after the premiere of Prélude à l’ Après-midi d’un faune, his musical evocation of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, that opened tonight’s programme. Relatively slow if never sluggish in unfolding, with its sensuous allure never in doubt at climactic moments, this was an approach that played to the strengths of the RPO (not least among them flautist Emer McDonough) and reminded one of just how game-changing this music felt as the 19th century drew – not a little uncertainly – towards its close.
Not too long before, Brahms’s First Symphony must have seemed the vindication of a very different aesthetic and it was to Ariane Matiakh’s credit that this performance evolved with unforced conviction and not a little spontaneity. Suitably implacable, the first movement’s introduction segued into an Allegro trenchant but never dogged in forward motion with no lack of impetus in its development or repose in its coda. Eloquently rendered, the ensuing Andante drew felicitous playing from the RPO woodwind as not the least of its attractions.
Poised unerringly between a wistful intermezzo and a playful scherzo, the third movement afforded ideal breathing-space before a finale that carried all before it. From its speculative introduction then radiant horn melody, Matiakh had the measure of a movement which can easily become discursive or even prolix, but here never lost focus through to an apotheosis whose resplendence never felt overbearing. Whether or not Brahms consciously emulated Beethoven in this work, his re-energizing of the symphonic genre could hardly be denied. A memorable evening which ought to lead to a continued association between the RPO and Matiakh. She is currently recording the symphonic works of Charles Koechlin for Capriccio, and it is to be hoped that one of these impressive pieces may yet achieve a UK performance.
Sophie Bevan (soprano), Gareth Brynmor John (baritone), CBSO Chorus (chorus-master, David Young), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth
Purcell Funeral Music for Queen Mary Z860 (1695) Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem Op.45 (1865-68)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Thursday 23 April 2026
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
Having begun five years ago in the (relative) aftermath of the pandemic, ‘CBSO Remembers’ has become a means of recalling those associated in some way with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and opportunity to schedule appropriate works with the CBSO Chorus.
This evening saw A German Requiem, Brahms’ largest and most-encompassing piece whose emotional impact is out of all proportion to its modest forces – not least compared with those settings of the Latin text by Berlioz or Verdi. Compiling his own text from the German Bible, Brahms drew attention not only to its linguistic basis but also the essentially humanist nature of its content. A work whose concern lies less with those departed than with those still living thereby conveys a message which, if not spiritually affirmative, is none the less one of hope.
The present account was nothing if not focussed on this latter quality, right from the outset of the initial ‘Blessed are they that mourn’ with its deft eliding between the ruminative and the aspiring. There was inexorable power to the fatalistic tread and fateful climaxes of ‘For all flesh is as grass’, with no lack of wistfulness in its central interlude then of joyousness in its unlikely if resolute continuation. To those earlier stages of ‘Lord, teach me’, as of ‘For here we have no abiding place’, Gareth Brynmor John conveyed earnest supplication with just a hint of strain; the ensuing fugues – energetic then defiant – retaining the requisite buoyancy thanks to a vividly incisive response by the CBSO Chorus and Ryan Wigglesworth’s astute marshalling of orchestral textures whose outward sombreness yielded a burnished richness.
In between these most dramatic movements, ‘How lovely are thy dwelling places’ unfolded as an oasis of unaffected calm, then ‘You now have sorrow’ brought a radiant response from Sophie Bevan in what was an afterthought for the work overall as well as its most personal, even confessional statement. It remained for ‘Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord’ to place the foregoing triumph in relief as it gradually retraced its musical steps toward an end of rapt acceptance; one whose understated depth characterized this performance as a whole.
At some 70 minutes the Brahms does not make a full programme on its own terms, so it was an inspired decision to preface this with Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Barely 15 minutes as to duration, its hieratic opening March is followed by a Canzona whose elliptical harmonies look forward almost 250 years to Tippett and which alternates with the setting of ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts’ whose three stages move from stark anguish towards searching resignation: understandable, while eternally regrettable, this music should have been heard at its composer’s own funeral eight months later. A pity, too, on this occasion that the Purcell could not have elided seamlessly into the Brahms though, given the logistics when incorporating offstage brass into the onstage orchestra, this was most likely unfeasible.
More importantly, it anticipated the main work with absolute sureness. One looks forward to Wigglesworth’s future appearances with the CBSO which, next Wednesday, tackles Brahms’ Violin Concerto and then Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony alongside Stanislav Kochanovsky.
Nelsen Goerner (piano) City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada
Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943) Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Op.43 (1934) Bartók Concerto for Orchestra BB123 (1943)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Thursday 9 April 2026
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Andrew Fox (above) and Marco Borggreve (below)
There was a pleasing overall balance to this evening’s concert from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its music director Kazuki Yamada: the three works, written within a decade of each other, drawing extensively on earlier composers or, indeed, traditional music.
If not as familiar as it once was (and not least in Birmingham), Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber is always worth revival – not least for finding Hindemith at his most approachable and uninhibited. It was this latter aspect which came over most vividly here – Yamada securing a forceful though never blowzy response in the opening Allegro, then making the most of its ‘Turandot’ Scherzo’s freewheeling play on Weber’s already recalcitrant overture to which the CBSO responded in like fashion. Easily to underestimate, the Andantino emerged as music of no mean pathos as well as a foil to the final March’s breezy treatment of incisive then jocular melodies, with a close of real panache. Did a smile on the face of certain older punters indicate the latter tune’s audible resemblance to a once popular wartime song?
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini has become increasingly familiar in recent decades, as has Rachmaninoff’s music as a whole, and tonight’s performance amply underlined why. He may not have partnered the CBSO for several years, but Nelson Goerner secured a rapport from the outset – the initial 15 variations pivoting between impetuosity and inwardness with dextrous assurance, then those three which constitute a ‘slow movement’ rendered with a soulfulness and, in the evergreen Variation XVIII, a deftness such as banished any hint of sentimentality. The closing six variations duly unfolded as a ‘finale’ capricious and scintillating, Goerner at one with the orchestra in rounding off this work with a deathless payoff. Impeccably played if emotionally aloof, Brahms’ Intermezzo in A major (Op. 118/2) was the less than apposite encore.
The CBSO has an association with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra itself going back decades with the present account notable, above all, for its sheer virtuosity of playing. Interpretatively things was not quite this consistent – the expressive contrasts in its Introduzione just a little inflexibly drawn so that the movement felt no more than the sum of its admittedly impressive parts, with the succession of duets in Presentando le coppie a little too detached from each other for this to become the genial though equally vulnerable scherzando it ideally should be.
Conversely, the Elegia had an ideal balance between wrenching anguish and that unworldly ‘night music’ from which it emerges and into which it ultimately withdraws, while the quirky interplay of styles and parodies – whether Léhar or Shostakovich seems beside the point – in the Intermezzo interrotto never sounded at all contrived. Neither did the Finale disappoint as it navigated between pulsating energy and brazen high jinx, on route to a coda of hushed anticipation capped by a peroration which set the seal on this work in an exhilarating QED.
Overall, a fine showing for the CBSO and Yamada in the wake of their latest European tour. The orchestra returns next week in an enterprising programme of Respighi and Puccini, the latter represented by syntheses from two of his operas devised by the conductor Carlo Rizzi.
To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on their principal conductor Kazuki Yamada and pianist Nelson Goerner
