Brahms had a special connection with Zurich. He attended
the opening of the Tonhalle, the city’s famous concert
hall, in 1895 and was the only living composer to be featured
on the ceiling painting; it’s reproduced in the booklet
for this set, part of the altogether splendid packaging. The
latter-day descendants of the orchestra for that opening concert
have here given us a cycle of symphonies with which I am sure
the composer would have been very pleased.
The first thing that strikes you is the beauty and colour of
the playing. Both times I’ve heard them live, it’s
the Tonhalle strings that have impressed me most, rich and rounded,
oozing with character. This makes them ideal for Brahms. The
mellow beauty of the Second’s first movement suits
them perfectly, but they also develop a distinctive sheen, even
a slight hard edge, for the more high energy moments, such as
the opening movement of the First or the invigorating
downward sweep that opens the Third. There is also some
sensational wind playing and some first rate solos, such as
the oboe in the First and the clarinet in the slow movements
of the Third and Fourth. The playing alone would
be worth the asking price, but it’s Zinman’s dynamic
conducting that holds the set together. His reading of each
symphony carries a clear sense of a transformational journey
which, for me, went beyond the ordinary. The transition from
darkness to light in the First is obvious, but Zinman
breaks it down still further so that there is ebb and flow in
each movement: in the first movement’s Allegro,
for example, there is an almost tangible feeling of the drama
and tension of the first subject being tamed by the gentler
lyricism of the second. The Second carries a steady trajectory
towards the celebration of the finale, but Zinman takes this
movement just a touch slower than many so that the ebullience
is contained within a certain set of rules. The Third
also seems to go on a steady path from the exhilaration of the
opening to an increasing sense of melancholy which is almost
- but not quite - solved by the finale. Only in the first two
movements of the Fourth was that sense of direction a
little lacking. The tension and energy ups dramatically with
the Scherzo and the final Passacaglia becomes so intense as
to be almost unbearable.
It helps that these live recordings were all taped within two
days, so we have here an unusually coherent reading of Brahms’
symphonic oeuvre. Sections of the press have damned this set
with faint praise, calling it a safe middle-of-the-road Brahms
cycle, but for me it’s much more than that: it’s
an intelligent, well argued reading of this great cycle which
stands comparison with any Brahms set that has come my way in
recent years. Zinman is very much in the traditional mould of
Brahms interpreters, eschewing the approaches of Harnoncourt
or Gardiner, but he argues convincingly that there is still
a place for this in our 21st century and he certainly
carried me along with him. The sound, by the way, is excellent,
rich and bloomy with plenty of clarity for the inner voices.
Incidentally, for those who are interested in such things, Zinman
observes all the exposition repeats. Live as these recordings
are, the audience is exceptionally well behaved and there is
not a hint of a cough throughout. Applause, and there must have
been much, is also absent. My only quibble is that the CDs give
us barely any time to digest one movement before the next begins,
surely an unnecessary compression of space when there is so
much spare time on each disc.
Simon Thompson
Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich/David Zinman 
