Johannes Brahms Paavo Berglund Chamber Orchestra of Europe - Brahms The Symphonies (16 tracks) +Album Reviews

A Brahms cycle to make you forget all others!

MartinP | Nijmegen, The Netherlands | 02/05/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Here are the Brahms symphonies like you've never heard them before, and after listening to this I wondered if I actually ever had heard them before. What Berglund and the COE bring to this music sounds so completely right! It's all very lean, extremely transparant and totally stunning. Any notion of Brahms as the composer of stolid, heavy, mushy music is swept away. The clarity of the inner voices reveals the continuous rhytmic activity and drive underpinning these scores, something that is alas almost never heard in recordings, and is so thrilling when properly brought to the fore. The relatively small string sections allow due prominence to the winds, every single line clearly audible, yet without the nusic becoming overly detailed or fussy. Nor is there any lack of feeling: Berglund and his team can sound utterly romantic, dreamy, mysterious or exciting/excited when they choose, and they do, in all the right places! Berglund is clearly very well aware of the structure of the music and knows which points to highlight, sometimes revealing snatches of important themes in places where you'd never heard them before. The playing of the COE is of the very highest order. First and second violins are placed opposite each other, resulting in some titillating dialogue. The recording itself is very clear and natural, and though it was made 'live' in concert the audience must have been stunned into silence, because you would never guess it's there.
In general, a Brahms cycle nobody who loves this music should miss! I can imagine no more perfect readings of the second and third symphonies; and if in the first and fourth I sometimes missed just that very last ounce of sheer weight and power, even there the insights on offer are so numerous and fascinating I wouldn't want to do without them either."

A new view of Brahms

David MacFarlane | Philadelphia, PA USA | 02/02/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"These recordings are revelatory. Berglund has clarified the textures of the symphonies so details previously hidden come out. Horn and woodwind parts that in other hands have been somewhat lost in the mix sing out. The structure of these symphonies is revealed in new ways and new interconnections have been laid out. I LOVE THESE! My only objection is that the first two discs are skimpy, about 44 minutes each. I know that this is a 3 disc set for the price of two, but couldn't the Overtures or the "Haydn" variations fill out each disc? Small matter. Buy these, they are TERRIFIC!"

Wonderful

Wayne A. | Belfast, Northern Ireland | 10/04/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"What's great fun is laying these out alongside the Mackerras set or Harnoncourt's--both fine examples of the new (and much welcome) revisionist Brahms performance style. Mackerras is lean too but a bit more traditional, Harnoncourt is like listening to Schoenberg--yet not a note is different. I found his set even more revealing than these, a lot of inner detail was there that was just extraordinary.

Passionate Brahms is great too and I can't live without my Furtwanglers but I don't find this set dry at all. I especially enjoy straight-up Brahms with a truly great orchestra. Few may agree but the Concertgebouw with Haitink is still, for me, the best blend of the various sounds one can get from Brahms. The orchestral playing is about the most beautiful I've ever encountered and his set with Boston is almost as good.

Funny how these new recordings make many earlier ones sound muddy in comparison and how that criticism was once leveled at Schumann (Brahms has also been accused of being a poor orchestrator). If this is how the Brahms symphonies sounded back in his time then the schism between him and the Wagner circle seems much more understandable--the contrast is much less obvious when we hear, say, Klemperer or even Karajan perform Wagner and Brahms. Maybe this is the truly correct way to hear the music?

Oh, an afterthought: Brahms leaner may not be as overtly passionate (I think here of the cartoon character Pepé Le Pew) but when you hear all that inner detail the music's a lot sexier.

"

Chamber orchestra Brahms, but still romantic

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 05/28/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"In these live readings from Baden-Baden in 2000, Paavo Berglund splits the difference with conventional big-band Brahms. The chamber Orch. of Europe is small enough so that the textures are lean, with fairly prominent winds (I imagine that in person they would be even more prominent; the microphones don't favor them here). There's minimal vibrato at times, but we aren't in the territory of Brahms as played by HIP types like Norrington and Gardiner. Berglund's approach is mostly romantic, with supply shaped phrases and soloists who play with feeling.

At times this Brahms cycle has mixed feelings about itself. Some of the tempos in Sym. 1 are as fast as Toscanini's, but the whole of Sym. 2 moves at conventional speeds. The conductor doesn't see the First as a tragic, turbulent work, which means that his Brahms-lite approach will either seem refreshing or off the mark. (did Brahms want this titanic successor to the Beethoven Ninth to be whipped cream?) The Third and Fourth also mix their styles, and for every time I missed the weight and power one expects in Brahms, there were others when the chamber-music rendition carried its own logic. I felt much the same about Daniel Harding's similar venture with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen on Virgin, but his Third and Fourth are more radically rethought than Brglund's.

In all, if you can get the Berglund cheap on the used market, it's three CDs aren't unreasonable. I don't know the competing Mackerras set on Telarc well enough to compare the two, but Gardiner and Norrington move further toward HIP, for what that's worth."

Brahms? I don't think so

Javier Bezos Lopez | Madrid, Spain | 04/10/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"In some sense, we have "period" performances of these symphonies: Toscanini, Weingartner, Monteux... Do we need "reconstructions"? I don't think so, but while Norrington and Mackerras sound right and, more importantly, they are musically very satisfying, Berglund sounds wrong. Why?

I cannot believe this is the COE we heard under Harnoncourt or Abbado - with the latter it is a solid tree where we can see every leaf, with Berglung is just a stunted plant (compare with the clarity of Norrington, too). Berglung is unable to shape transitions like Toscanini or, in the opposite side, Mackerras (very flexible and at the same time very natural). Music doesn't flow - period. In addition, he's is unable to balance melodic lines, and in fact to find where the main line is. This is not what Toscanini, Weingartner, Monteux, etc., told and still tell us about Brahms. This is not Brahms.

I own this set but after a few hearings (I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something) I've never returned to it (well, I've just heard it again to write this review, but...).

"

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