home > browse > cd-feature > view article

CD Feature/ Peter Maag: Johannes Brahms

  Tobias

Conductor Peter Maag, who died just a few years ago, might have remained fairly unknown – but he possessed a silent grandeur which well deserves wider recognition. ARTS have taken on the job of paying hommage to him by releasing a whole series of his recordings. And it has to be said that both the rendition of Brahms’ Symphony No1 as well as the Alt-Rhapsody  offer some insights, which are dearly missing in most interpretations of this work. Here’s just two of them.

Let’s face it: Brahms is a hard nut to crack (especially in his younger years). He likes to create transitions by the use of contrasts, through surprising musical complexes, confusing expectations just to offer even clearer outlines and structures in the next passage – quite a difference to Wagner, who thought of the “art of transition” as as a gradual process. The first Symphony is full of such heterogenous strcutures and thematical frictions, quite certainly acting partly as a reflexion and expression of their decade-long agonising creation (it took Brahms more than ten years to write this piece). Many interpreters tend to expose these kind of elements even more. The result is mostly fatally misguided, because the music ends up as an unbalanced entity, only held together by a sum of mostly contrasting and sometimes corresponding parts – but not as a living process. At best, it’s a euphonic chaos. Maag, however, is a master in finding the right emphasis. And he never loses touch with the basic pulse, a sense of rhythm, which really holds things together and acts as a unifying power. It is thus that the second remarkable instant is connected to the first: It’s one of those rare recording, which makes you listen to the famous horn-part in the fourth movement with different ears: It’s not just a nice moment, which seems out of place in a hide and seek, but clearly and organically integrated into the entire composition; it’s not a stoppage, not a time of resting at an idyllic place – rather, it’s just one station which symphony as a whole moves through.

Maags interpretations are terrific, because they are the exact opposite of showmanship: Their artistic integrity and inner density are exemplary and truly open up new horizons.

by Jan Giffhorn

Homepage: ARTS Music