Daniele Gatti conducts Brahms, Stravinsky and Webern

Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz for string quartet was composed when he was just starting his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. The composition, which was only rediscovered in the 1960s, is characterised by an impassioned, expressive style reminiscent of early Schoenberg or Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. However, the late Romantic tone is also attributable to a personal experience: at the time the work was written, Webern had fallen in love with his cousin Wilhelmine, who later became his wife.

The late 1930s were a particularly turbulent and difficult time for Igor Stravinsky. His first wife and daughter died of tuberculosis, and the outbreak of the Second World War prompted the composer to emigrate to the United States. The Symphony in C, which Stravinsky wrote in 1940 in transit between continents, as it were, gives no indication of these biographical events. During this creative period, the composer was convinced of the primacy of the purely musical form over emotional expression. The four-movement work, whose captivating Larghetto concertante features solo passages for individual instruments, is the most Classical of Stravinsky’s five symphonies, each of which is stylistically very different.

Johannes Brahms also felt bound to the symphonic model of the First Viennese School, yet each of his four contributions to the genre takes on a form all of its own. The Third Symphony spans a wide arc from the first to the last bars: the opening theme of the first movement, shifting between major and minor, reappears at the end of the finale – here in a decisively major key. It begins with the notes F-A-F, with the words “Frei, aber froh” (free, but happy) assigned to them; a variation on the motto F-A-E, “frei, aber einsam” (free, but lonely). The latter was the shared motto of Brahms and his close friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, in their youth. However, while Joachim married twice, Brahms remained a bachelor throughout his life.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Daniele Gatti