‘Truly, Brahms was the most unhappy of great composers’.
So observes the composer Hugh Wood, and the truth of this is most readily
apparent in a section of his oeuvre that is less familiar now than it
was in his own time. From his early days as director of various amateur
choral societies, Brahms wrote works which catered for them, and the
development of his musical language throughout his life is traceable
with a clarity otherwise only possible in his output for keyboard. A
contrast between earthly transience and a vaguely promised peace in
the hereafter informs the emotional and musical content not just of
the German Requiem but of the Song of Destiny, the Alto Rhapsody, Song
of the Fates (Gesang der Parzen) and Nänie, not to mention many
of the motets. The tension between these two states is particularly
acute in the shorter choral works. Brahms is consistently reluctant
to carry through musically the portents of woe and doom which his chosen
texts prophesy, as if to do so would tempt fate, Mahler-like, in his
own life. Quiet, major-key conclusions of apparent serenity in the face
of loss and grief do not after a while ring very true but rather suggest
a stoic and even fatalistic approach to life’s troubles.
The compilers have made some strange decisions in their
selection from the company’s English, German and French catalogues.
Take the Alto Rhapsody, poignantly done by Janet Baker; she was
in good voice for this Virgin recording, but if only French EMI had
called in her recording from 20 years earlier made with Sir Adrian Boult
on superbly introspective form, currently lurking on an HMV Classics
disc. Richard Hickox loses his way at the transition from Goethe’s despairing
Harzreise in Winter to Brahms’s own text for the consolatory
chorale, which thereby adds support to Wood’s contention that it is
‘the weakest section of the piece… only achieving a certain sanctimoniousness’.
Klaus Tennstedt’s German Requiem is firmly in the reverential
mould of Celibidache, Lehmann, Haitink and others, if more inclined
than them to sudden conflagrations of intensity. So the sectional structure
of Denn wir haben kein bleibende Statt with its many tempo changes
convinces more successfully than Tennstedt’s restlessness in Denn
alles fleisch ist wie als gras. Jessye Norman is too voluptuously
voiced for Ihr hab nun ein Traurigkeit, but her breath control
enables her to loft lines where others break them halfway through. Hynninen,
like Bryn Terfel, Wolfgang Brendel and David Wilson-Johnson, threatens
fire and brimstone more effectively than he offers peaceful consolation.
The choir's first entry is disappointingly muffled and the engineers
continue to do them few favours. They muster plenty of enthusiasm for
the work's two great fugues (in the third and sixth movements) and their
German is excellent. Their intonation is not as culpable as the Vienna
Singverein on several versions, but nor is it anywhere near perfect.
Brahms places such strenuous demands on the choir (possibly exceeding
even those of the Missa Solemnis) that live recordings of the
Requiem must nearly always be borne with a certain amount of patience.
I have almost never heard a soprano section which can project the opening
line of the concluding Selig sind die Toten with a clean, fresh
forte immediately after the rigours of Denn wir haben kein bleibende
Statt. The Eric Ericson Chamber Choir and Swedish Radio Choir manage
it for Abbado, on DG and on TDK DVD, but the ladies of the London Philharmonic
Choir (in the studio) do not.
The initial issue of Tennstedt’s German Requiem
was paired with a fine Song of Destiny, cut from the same contemplative
cloth. The compilers have passed over it in favour of a Plasson recording
that is new to the UK but no more desirable for that. It’s more transparent,
but then so is weak coffee: with Tennstedt (and Abbado, whose three
recordings indicate his strong sympathy for the piece) you can taste
the grains at the bottom of Brahms’s cup. What the compilers give with
one hand they take away with the other: Plasson’s original coupling
(with Rinaldo) of the funereal Begräbnisgesang is
rejected in favour of Roger Norrington’s starker view. The volumes of
German Baroque music by Schütz, Bruhns and others which covered
Brahms’s library are brought to life again in the simplicity of the
vocal writing, throbbing drum beats and portentous trombone lines.
Bernard Haitink’s two recordings of Nänie
both offer greater contrasts and character than Wilhelm Pitz. If the
slightly wobbly ladies of the Tanglewood Festival Choir (in the later
one) are an acquired taste, they project Schiller’s tale of ancient
woe with keen understanding. Even they, however, sound like a raggedy
bunch compared to Robert Shaw’s magnificent Chorale for Toscanini’s
still-unmatched Gesang der Parzen from November 1948. This time
it is Goethe who harks back to Classical Greece for an evocation of
the gods looking down from their Olympian heights to mourn humanity.
The boomy sound accorded to Plasson hardly beguiles any more than the
infamously dry Studio 8-H at NBC, and even that can’t disguise the muddy
attack of Plasson’s Dresden forces and his rather generalised approach.
This is less of a problem in Plasson’s recordings of
Triumphlied and Rinaldo, though mostly because the comparisons are much
scarcer. Reasons for these works’ neglect aren’t hard to find: Triumphlied
taps the patriotic-German part of Brahms’s psyche that is understandably
less than fashionable these days and does so in a four-square way that
provides ammunition for those who condemn its composer’s ‘bourgeois’
temperament. Nevertheless, its grandiose, Handelian choruses are enjoyable
enough once in a while, and are (ironically) sung with gusto by Giuseppe
Sinopoli’s Czech team on DG.
This set’s usefulness as a compendium of Brahms’s choral-orchestral
works is however compromised by its sketchy coverage of the rest of
his output for mixed voices. In no way could the charming Liebeslieder-walzer
and Ziguener-lieder be classed as ‘choral’ yet they take up the whole
of the fifth disc. They are sung here, as intended, by one voice per
part, in elderly Electrola recordings and in a style that would not
have sounded out of place in your grandparents’ parlour. If the compilers
had to include these miniatures, they could at least have dug out the
zippy set with Olaf Bär et al from 15 years ago. As it is, they
edge out the vigorous Marienlieder op.22, the op.44 pair of motets,
the op.37 triptych … and others. At least we have perhaps the finest
of them all, Warum is das licht gegeben, which combines a Baroque structural
rigour with aching, entirely modern harmonies in its setting of Luther’s
song of penitent longing (you may be spotting a pattern here). Along
with the two op.29s, it is piously delivered by King’s Cambridge, who
eschew entirely the forceful delivery and dynamic extremes which make
Marcus Creed’s discs with the RIAS Chamber Choir on Harmonia Mundi so
memorable. These latter discs span almost all the unaccompanied music,
as well as the gorgeous four songs op.17. If you wanted one stepping
stone from the German Requiem to the rest of Brahms’s choral works this
would be it, and it is more than competently done (with nicely balanced
horns and harp: what an accompanimental stroke of genius!) by Hickox
and his singers.
Though you can find better performances of everything
on this set, its considerable virtue still lies in providing a cheap
overview of the beauties and contradictions of an often overlooked body
of work. Its greatest fault is one common to all EMI France’s compilation
boxed sets, the lamentable lack of recording information, texts and
translations.
Peter Quantrill
EMI CLASSICS 575 722-2
[five discs, 5h 42’]