Brahms' Symphony No 4 BBC Proms

Tonight's prom promises to be a rare treat. Internationally

acclaimed musicians, an impassioned Piano Concerto and a symphonic

masterpiece all under one roof. Hello and welcome to the Royal

Albert Hall for the second of two concerts devoted to the music of

Brahms and with a stellar line-up. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe,

the legendary conductor, Bernard Haitink, and one of the most sought

after pianists of the 21st century, Emanuel Ax.

Already on stage are the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Formed in 1981,

they are celebrating their 30th anniversary with a sickle of Brahms

concerts conducted by Bernard Bernard Haitink, one of the most

reveered conductors in the world has been conducting Brahms for more

than half a century and describes him as a composer who thinks with

his heart and feels with his brain. Brahms's music and he is underrated.

People say he's German, heavy, old- fashioned, he's traditional. But so

much feeling in it and very often sadness in Brahms. He was a lonely

man. Music was his way of telling people how much I loved humanity

and people and how much he wanted to have his music telling them. I

think that it's extremely human. Later, we'll hear Brahms's fourth

and much-loved Symphony. First, this evening's prom opens with

Emanuel Ax's second concerto. It combines work with combines

intimate exchanges between piano and orchestra together with drama

on an epic scale. Ax learnt the piece more than 30 years ago and he

says he's been trying to get it right ever since. He is a poetic

So, here comes tonight's soloist, Emanuel Ax and conductor Bernard

Haitink to join the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for a

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 2926 seconds

performance of Brahm's Second Piano A masterful performance by all on

stage of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto.

Emanuel Ax playing with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by

Bernard Haitink. Wonderful sense of community on

stage. So noticeable how Emanuel Ax communicated with every other

musician he was playing with and of Emanuel Ax describes the Piano

Concerto as the corner stone of any pianist's life, incredibly

difficult but very much worth it. He said of the final movement, he

finished with the suffering, the storm and stress and now we are

playing in heaven. A sentiment shared by the audience here at the

Royal Albert Hall and clearly by Emanuel Ax, Manny, as he's known,

born in Poland, grew up in can darbgs then later in New York where

he said he spent his teenage years listening to all the greats in

Carnegie hall, a wonderful time for a budding musician, he says,

listening to the likes of Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and

Ashkenazy. All these people were so great, you would go to a recital

and the next day you would try and sound like them, which is of course

what young pianists listening to It's international time here at the

Royal Albert Hall and in the second half of the concert, we'll hear

Brahms's fourth final Symphony. Nearly two centuries after his

birth, love him or hate him, Brahms is still one of the most performed

and recorded composers. But what do we know about this intensely

private man? I headed off to Vienna to find out more about the Brahms

There are two positions you can take on Brahms. You either find him

impossible like some composers. are ready to test Brahms? Bores me

to death. It's so thick. When it's good, sounds like Beethoven.

Or you feel his music touches the sublime. You know anything more

beautiful? As beautiful perhaps but A new generation of musicians has

For me, Brahms is the most human composer in the best way. It gives

me energy, exactly the same thing that if I go to the mountain and I

get air, or go in front of the sea and you breathe and feel like

stronger, Brahms for me is this. It's true that we feel something

very comfortable. Unique. And very in the nature which is down-to-

earth, which is the earth, the nature, the life, really how we are

and how we make music. You could feel that this man was enjoying

life and you can hear it in the Brahms was born in 1833 in a poor

district of the port of Hamburg. He was a promising young pianist and

earned his money playing in bars and brothels.

While his mind was full of lofty artistic ideals, he was witnessing

human life at its most brutal. He later said he saw things which

left a deep shadow on his mind. This statue has Brahms peering down

at a female mews. In later life, he was considered something of a

misogynist who frequented prostitutes. He never married

although he apparently claim close a few times. But there was woman to

whom brams remained devoted his entire life -- Brahms. Clara was a

brilliant pianist and the wife of composer Robert Shooman. When the

20-year-old Brahms visited the couple, they were en tranceed by

him. It was a meeting fit for a Hollywood movie and became one

called Song of Love. Robert Walker played Brahms.

Go on! Go on! Clara, come here. Listen. It's my wife. Shooman die

add few years later and Clara remained devoted to his memory.

Brahms clearly adored and respected her, but the film shows him

daringly unsuccessfully proposing marriage. Dear Clara... I'm hurting

you so... You can't help it. Clara reject Brahms as Hollywood

suggests or was it possibly the other way around? We'll never

Though Brahms had a deep respect for the past, he was always

troubled by the shadow of his great predecessor, Beethoven, overawed,

it took him over 20 years to write his first Symphony, only for it to

It's not like Beethoven in the end. The solution that Brahms achieves

is quite unlike Beethoven. The achievement of the first

Symphony is to draw together the classical and the romantic and the

extreme romantic. What it is that makes that Symphony unique is that

it's able to draw together this intensity of feeling. A Symphony

that actually, when you look at it, tells a kind of personal story.

There is a theme strongly associated with Clara, his ideal

love in the finale. That's the big turning point in the Symphony, the

moment that turns it from darkness That's as romantic an idea as you

could possibly look for, this is the moment of the redeeming love,

the ideal woman who intervenes and the Symphony changes direction at

this point. That does not fit with the image of Brahms as this

backward looking classicist at all. Though Brahms is a very German

composer, he's always had his champions in France. Take this

novel by Sagan. A Brahms concert helps a Roman blossom. What are

Brahms? Look over there. In the film version of the book, Brahms's

3rd Symphony becomes a love theme for IngridBergman. Now the first

The same theme was turned into a song by the notorious creator for

Brahms also signified romantic passion for the foreign. Film

director Louis Mall who used the Brahms was a handsome, beardless

fellow when he made the inevitable move to Vienna, the city of bait

hoifen and shoe Bert. But it seems everywhere he lived has since

disappeared. This is where he first lived in 1862. Not here exactly,

this building can't be more than 50 years old. This is where he lived

in 1866. I think... In 1969 -- 1869, he took rooms at this hotel. But

it's changed a lot. This is the site of his final

address. He had an apartment four floors up. Well, at least there's a

He'd look out of his window at this glorious building, he liked to walk

from his apartment across a bridge that has also long since vanished

to arrive where many of his greatest works were performed, the

famous Music Verine. But Brahms also enjoyed the lighter

side of the city, the Prata. The Woods. And he was very fond of the

popular music of the day. One of his closest friends was none other

than the waltz King himself, Johann Strauss II. In fact when Brahms was

asked by Strauss's wife to autograph her fan, he wrote a few

notes of tf Blue Danube and the The supporters of Richard Wagner,

the great radical composer of music dramas were fiercely opposed to

Brahms as a representative of a conservative, classical tradition.

Sometimes there were even punch-ups between rival factions at concerts.

It was a lively scene of the kind you don't tend to see at classical

concerts these days. I wonder how much Brahms enjoyed being drawn

into all this. It obliged him to take up a position. But there are

certainly moments in Brahms's music where you can hear strong echoes of

the kind of harmonic language, the kind of disillusion of tonality

that is going on. He had more of an admiration for Wagner than he would

have admitted in public. You may have heard that Brahms had

his voice and piano playing recorded on a wax cylinder by a

representative of Thomas Eddie son. -- Iddison. -- Eddison. That is a

Hungarian dance that you can hear underneath all that crackle. It

sounds as if someone is saying "I am Dr Brahms". Is that the voice of

the man himself? It has been suggested it's the voice of the

technician who was there at the time. As for whether it was Brahms

playing the piano, again a secret When Brahms died in 1897, the city

of Vienna gave him a spln did funeral. Thousands of people lined

the streets as his coffin was brought from his apartment to this

cemetery -- splendid funeral. Here, facing his predecessors, Beethoven

and Schubert, lies Brahms. Side by side with Johann Strauss.

Joining me now are Hannah French, a lecturer at the Royal Academy of

Music and Matthew Rowe, the conductor. Hannah, let me start by

asking you, what is it about tonight's performance of Brahms

that makes it so special? It's simply because this magnificent

ensemble resembles the historical counterparts in both size and

reputation. It's a real treat to hear this music played with such

clarity and elegance. And this is how Brahms would have heard it, I

guess? Exactly. He conducted the orchestra in the premier of this

work in 1885 and he said of the ensemble that he admired their

spirit and sensitivity to playing his music.

Now, Matthew, you and I have spent many, many hours discussing

conducting and conducting style when you were trying to guide me

through Maestro. Bernard Haitink is legendary, one of the greats, but

what makes him so special? He's really a musician's conductor.

Very economical. There is no flamboyant ness about him. He has

this intensity and this wonderful integrity with his music-making. He

always goes back to the score, always restudying things, finding

new things there. That comes through in his conducting. Just

take a look at this because this is Bernard Haitink conducting here at

the Proms in 1973,. Let's have a Yes, so it really hasn't changed

very much at all in all these years, still incredibly economy and you

can see him listening so intently to the ensemble which he does so

brilliantly and reacts to what he hears. There is no question that

with an ensemble Reich this there is this mutual respect on stage

which create this is wonderful security of sound? Absolutely.

There is the most fantastic relautionship with this orchestra

and he loves conducting them because there is so much give-and-

take -- relationship. He has a wonderful ability to guide them in

a very commanding way but seemingly with such a light hand and such a

light touch and such a sense of peace which I love watching.

So Hannah, with the fourth and final Symphony we are going to hear

in the second half, what can we expect? We can expect to see the

two sides of Brahms, the scholar side and the real passionate side.

Really it's the combination of his symphonic writing, those the

Chamber and the nature of the writing and the performance that we

hear will be very evident. The scholar and the passionate. The

scholarness comes through in his great historical model sin the

Sizing the old with the new as he does in so many works but

eespecially as he does here with the connection to Bh. All the

things are brought together, the 18th century dance, the curtain

call, the variations for the different characters and yet what

Brahms disease with it is very much of his own time and romantic

language hung on this framework if you like. Matthew, he's notorious

for being obsessed by his own mortality. Do we hear that a lot in

this work? The most striking thing is that it's the one Symphony that

ends in the minor key, it begins and ends in the minor. There is a

wonderful moment in the last movement where it goes into the

major and seems a little brighter but still it returns to the minor

and ends darkly and sombrely. way we are hearing Brahms tonight,

this clarity and precision and lightness of touch that we are

hearing from the Chamber Orchestra, is this a new trend, do you feel,

that is going to become more and more mainstream, I guess, in terms

of the playing of Brahms? Have we completely moved away from the

heavy late 19th century, early 20th century style? I hope so, in many

ways. I think that Henry Wood might have a thing or do to do with the

way that the music has been received and obviously people have

this sense of it being thick and heavy. A full Symphony orchestra

twice the size of this ensemble has the power and intensity of the

passion that we know that Brahms had heard in his lifetime but that

perhaps he favoured this intricate feeling where we see the inner

lines coming through. You will see that again as we did before with

the violins. Well, we can see that Bernard Haitink is coming on to the

stage now to conduct Brahms's fourth and final Symphony so

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 2926 seconds

Matthew Rowe and Hannah French, A splendid performance of Brahms's

Fourth Symphony, performed by the chaim we are orchestra of Europe,

conducted by Bernard Haitink. His As he congratulates and thanks

members of this wonderful Chamber Orchestra, it was formed back in

1981 by a group of young musicians who'd all played together at the

European community Youth Orchestra but were getting too old for that.

They didn't want to stop playing together. One said, we all had

someone we didn't want to say goodbye to, so it was either get

married or form a new orchestra or, presumably in some cases, both.

Their leader, Marieke Blakestijn there, one of the original members,

there are 18 of the original members still playing in the

Chamber Orchestra of Europe. That's Chris Parks on the horn there.

Principal flute player there, played so beautifully in the last

movement. The orchestra now considered to be the finest Chamber

Orchestra in the world and adore As I said, Bernard Haitink

conducting his 85th prom, but his very first exposure to the Proms

was actually listening, as a young boy, living in Nazi-occupied

Holland during the Second World War and he'd listened illegally to the

BBC broadcasts on the radio. He says the reception was terrible,

but he'd still manage to hear a few notes. He remembers especially

hearing a Proms concert of Brahms, Bernard Haitink thanking the

audience once more at the end of this wonderful prom. Haitink said

Brahms was able to use music to express humanity. That's all from

the Royal Albert Hall. You can hear a live prom every night on Radio

Three. If you missed yesterday's prom given by this orchestra, it's

available now on the BBC iPlayer. BBC Four will be back on the Proms

tomorrow for the Verdi Requiem conducted by Semyon Bychkov. I'll

be back next Saturday on BBC Two and BBC HD for a Proms first, Tim