Search - Johannes Brahms, Philippe Herreweghe :: Motets

HOW WELL DO WE KNOW BRAHMS?

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 01/01/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Many experienced classical concertgoers and record-collectors very likely know Brahms's instrumental music and the big choral works with orchestra nearly by heart. For myself I could probably hum, sing or whistle most of it without significant errors, although for good and understandable reasons I am never asked to do so. This disc, under the direction of an eminent specialist in ancient music, shows us another face of the composer and a very important one. At different stages of his career Brahms served as director of choral societies, and he made the performance of mediaeval unaccompanied polyphony a central part of the curriculum. Certain features of the ancient art had never lapsed, fugues for one thing being displayed as a badge of pride by composers down the centuries. The step-change from Brahms was that he revived the entire set of techniques, and with enormous power.



In fact even his most familiar music, romantic and expressive in the perfectly ordinary sense, is full of contrapuntal and academic devices. Brahms thought polyphony as naturally as Tchaikovsky thought orchestral tone. When Brahms asked Joachim what he thought of the first pair of unaccompanied motets op 29, Joachim started to praise their academic mastery, and Brahms said `Never mind that, are they good music?' With Brahms it always does to think twice about what he might be saying. The question could have been perfectly sincere and straightforward; on the other had it could have been a test, to see whether Joachim had any genuine appreciation of what it was all about. You will hear some familiar features of Brahms's idiom here, for instance his typical harmonic suspensions. What you will not hear is `tunes' of his usual kind. His motets resemble Bach's to a certain extent, the academic extent. There can't be many techniques of augmentation, diminution, canon, inversion, fugue and the rest of it not exhibited here. However you would know in a moment that this is not Bach. The style is unmistakably 19th century for one thing, for all the antiquarian display. The spiritual side of it is utterly unlike Bach too. All Bach's music was to the greater glory of God: Brahms was an unbeliever, the nearest he had to a religion was probably the great German musical tradition itself, and the religious statements in the texts are significant as part of that tradition, not significant in their own right as they were to Bach. There is also a different feel to the choral writing. Brahms was a natural stylist of the voice, Bach's vocal writing is deeply influenced by instruments, and I am in full agreement with one writer who finds in Brahms's choral tone the most significant advance in the matter since Handel himself, and that is no coincidence either. This is pure abstract music. It does not `express' or even directly respond to its text in the way his songs and the familiar choral works do. In this he is completely at one with Bach - there is only one solution to setting these texts, and that the best from an exclusively musical point of view.



The works on this record come from each stage of Brahms's career, but they are not taken in strict sequence of composition, and in my opinion rightly not. The five short pieces op 109 come first, and wisely so as they are the easiest for a listener without a background in music of this type. Chronological order is followed from there on, again rightly as that reflects the development in the composer's idiom in pieces that are basically of the same kind. The singing seems to me very good in all essential respects, and Herreweghe knows what he is doing. The complex mix of ancient and modern, traditional with innovative, is caught very subtly and well, for instance in the director's sense of how to vary the tempo. The recording does its job in a very satisfactory way, particularly in the first and overriding requirement of achieving clarity in the part-writing. I know and love Brahms's symphonies, concertos, quartets etc pretty well, but if I did not know this side of him I would be finding less in them than I do."