Brahms: Symphony No. 2

Album review

Aremarkable, transparent purity can be heard in Brahms’s Secondsymphony. It is a sharp contrast to the huge arsenal of ideascollected in the First Symphony, which Brahms had worked on formany years. Here in his Second he shows us his masterful skill indeveloping large-scale architecture from the simplest motifs. To givethe first of these to the horns is a logical choice; Brahms always usednatural horns and resisted the more modern instruments. Horns canideally explore the purest of all musical ideas: the journey through theovertones.Similar purity is present in all the themes. When at the start thebasses step down a semitone and step back again, nobody could guesswhat a rich new world would develop from this cell. The last movementis also built on a simple tool: repeated, equal notes follow each other inregimental order (a classical tradition often heard in final movementsby Haydn or Mozart).Is this Brahms’s most nature-related symphony? Considering thecomplicated organisms that develop from the simplest cells, yes, it is.Brahms certainly has the divine, creative talent to show us how thisprocess can work in music.Iván Fischer