Herbert Blomstedt, Claudio Abbado, Stephen Cleobury, Simon Preston - Johannes Brahms: Choral Works (1997)

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Herbert Blomstedt, Claudio Abbado, Stephen Cleobury, Simon Preston - Johannes Brahms: Choral Works (1997)

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One of Brahms' earliest musical jobs (besides playing piano in whorehouses) was directing a choral society. This introduced him to the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque, which sparked his antiquarian enthusiasms, in particular his first-hand encounters with the choral music of Bach. Choral music became an important part of Brahms' output – to his art, to his career (Ein deutsches Requiem propelled him to European notice), and to his income. Brahms may have directed much of his choral music to the then-lucrative amateur market, but he also produced plenty for crack choirs and without much reasonable hope for financial reward – again, Ein deutsches Requiem a good example. Like the Requiem, some of these works even became popular.
For me, Brahms' great contribution was to transform the concert aria into a vehicle of meditation. That's what we have with the Schicksalslied (song of destiny), Nänie, Gesang der Parzen (song of the fates), and, most apparent, the Alto Rhapsody. The Begräbnisgesang (burial song) and Rinaldo are, to a large extent, sports in his catalogue – one early, one late. The early work, Brahms' first major piece for accompanied chorus, hews closely to conventional choral music of the time, with, of course, some harmonic swerves the composer has put in the listener's way, just to keep things interesting. Rinaldo, a setting of an 1811 text for music by Goethe, is a dramatic scena, perhaps the culmination of the composer's failed efforts to write an opera. We do know that he lost interest in the work before he completed it, and the final chorus gave him a lot of trouble. Outside of the Requiem, it's his longest work for chorus and orchestra, and it enjoyed a successful première. Clara Schumann, however, voiced her doubts as to whether it stood as a worthy successor to the Requiem. Posterity has apparently agreed with her. It's not terrible, by any means, but it lacks the power of just about every other piece on the program. What you realize is that Brahms is a lyric, rather than a dramatic composer. He's much more interested in depicting emotional states than conflict between characters. Better than either Begräbnisgesang or Rinaldo would have been the Triumphlied, "ein deutsches Te Deum," written in the Germanic patriotic fervor following the Franco-Prussian War.
So many of these works concern death in some way. Furthermore, Brahms very rarely gives death the final word. Indeed, he did some fudging with Hölderlin's ending of Schicksalslied so everything "would come out right." H¨lderlin begins with the calm beauty of the gods and ends with humanity flushed into the unknown (the image is pretty close to that of a modern toilet). But Brahms doesn't leave us with that violence. Instead, he brings back the music of the Elysian introduction, even more brightly scored. Nänie, to a text by Schiller, laments that "even beauty must die," but Brahms ends with the lines "Even to be an elegy in the mouth of the beloved is glorious."
The CD has the great advantage of combining a bunch of works in one place. The performances are all at least good and, in some cases, as good as can be got.

–Steve Schwartz

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Herbert Blomstedt, Claudio Abbado, Stephen Cleobury, Simon Preston - Johannes Brahms: Choral Works (1997)

Close