Search - Walter, Brahms, New York Philharmonic Orchestra :: Conducts Brahms

A magnificent and sensational finding!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 07/16/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Through the years, I have realized the underground connection between Bruno Walter and Gustav Mahler, and the overall understanding around his entire work has been the main reason for him to play his Brahms with such notable wholeness.



By some reason Walter seemed to have a very tied affinity with the second symphony. His assertive feature, and undeniable spring breath, exudes that portentous vigor and lyrical musculature that we never see in the rest of his symphonies. Walter knew to remark and even blend with sheer eloquence, the bucolic mood, the reflexive moments as soon as the declamatory last movement which almost means a true Ode to life, where the creative joyfulness, the incandescent joviality and the freshness of the innocence were so notably remarked and even sung by the members of all the Orchestra Alter conducted.



Nobody like him could convey to such privileged level, the Dionysian spirit that visibly is contained in the score: By unexplainable reasons most of directors have turned this movement into a taut and rigid approach becoming of it practically an academic exercise of granitic meaning without soul and delirious robustness, distorting through this involuntary omission a serious problem at the end of the Op.



If you are a newcomer listener and sincerely you would like to bet for a secure choice in this version, you should acquire this album, and if you are a hard fan, you should enrich still more your repertoire with this radiant performance. The Academic Overture and the Tragic Overture own inner and febrile tension and spirit.



So don't hesitate and try by all your means around this unexplainably valuable CD that still had not received yet any previous comment.



Since I got in 1998, I regularly listen, enhancing itself day after day.





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