Brahms: Symphony No. 3 & Serenade No. 2

Album review

On June 11th 2021, Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra complete their Brahms Symphony Cycle on Channel Classics Records. This new album features Brahms: Symphony No. 3 and Serenade No. 2.
A minor miracle! The recording commenced one day prior to Hungary closing its borders on September 1st, 2020. Engineer/Producer Jared Sacks had just arrived from The Netherlands. Despite the lockdown, the venue remained accessible, and the recording could be completed.
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“A life’s story in ten bars – there is no more magnificent opening of a symphony than the first 34 seconds of Brahms’ Third. We hear a resolute harmony, a proud major chord followed by a twisted one on the same foundation – good and evil, heroic and mean – but it is a mere introduction to the real birth, a victorious emanation of energy, full of life and light. Each bar of this outburst takes us to a new experience: to happiness in F major, sadness in F minor, wandering into the distantly related D flat major, with a confusing dead end of the diminished 7th as if we would almost lose our way. But then a magic solution takes us on a lyrical journey reaching first to fulfillment and finally to a peaceful decline. This is how we should live.”
- Iván Fischer
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Brahms dedicated himself to music that was pure and abstract, which ‘portrayed’ nothing: no stories, no travel epics, no visual impressions. But nonetheless the Third does possess a personal undercurrent. The main thread of all four movements is the little motief F-A-F. With these three notes Brahms, the eternal bachelor, expressed his personal motto ‘Frei aber froh!’ - free but happy! It was a reaction to the musical signature F-A-E (‘Frei aber einsam’ - free but lonely) of his good friend the violinist Joseph Joachim. And despite all his aversion to the new rage of the symphonic poem, he delighted in the letter from Clara Schumann after she heard the symphony: ‘The opening movement depicts a delicious dawn ... the second movement an idyll, prayer in a small chapel in the woods, the flow of a brook, the rummaging of little beetles...’
- From: Liner Notes by Clemens Romijn