Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Martinů – Tennstedt

Klaus Tennstedt loved this symphony so much he practically wore it out — or so the joke went among London Philharmonic players who watched him return to Brahms’s op. 68 again and again across a decade, each time as though he had never quite settled his account with the piece. He recorded it commercially for EMI in 1983. He conducted it live at least twice more in London before his health finally forced him from the podium. So the question a listener has to ask, picking up yet another Tennstedt First, is simple: does Stuttgart tell us anything the London traversals didn’t?

Mostly, yes. Not for the reasons you’d expect, though.

The Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart is a different animal from the LPO — leaner string tone, woodier and more forward winds — and Tennstedt seems to have responded by pulling back slightly on the sheer weight he asked of his English players. The famous introduction, those hammering timpani strokes, that chromatic climb Brahms took decades to work up the nerve to publish, has less of the granite-block inexorability of the BBC Legends account and more transparency, more sense of inner voices moving. Whether that’s a gain depends on temperament. I missed, at moments, the physical menace Tennstedt could summon in London. But Stuttgart gives back clarity: you hear the bassoon writing in the first movement development the way you rarely do, and the horn solo that opens the finale’s introduction arrives less like an apparition than an argument, patiently made.

The slow movement is where this performance earns its keep. Tennstedt never rushed Brahms’s andante sostenuto, and here the concertmaster’s solo, that long violin line floating above pizzicato strings before the horn answers, is shaped with real tenderness, unhurried, almost vocal in its phrasing. It’s a small thing. It matters.

Where the reading falls short of the very finest — Furtwängler’s incandescent, structurally free wartime account, or Carlos Kleiber’s live Vienna traversal with its terrifying gathering of momentum into the coda — is in the ultimate sense of inevitability. Tennstedt is a wonderful conductor of tension and grandeur, but the architecture here occasionally feels episodic, movement to movement, rather than the single unbroken arc from C minor darkness to C major triumph the very greatest accounts achieve. It’s a fine performance. It is not, finally, a great one. But then almost nothing is, in this symphony, which sets an impossible bar.

The real news on this disc, and it is genuine news, is the Martinů.

I don’t know of another recorded Martinů performance by Tennstedt, and neither, apparently, does anyone else. His forays into Czech repertoire on disc have been confined mostly to Janáček, an affinity documented on a pair of BBC Legends releases that deserve to be far better known than they are. That he should have taken up the Symphony No. 4 at all tells you something about his musical curiosity late in a career that too many people remember only for Mahler.

And what a piece to have chosen. Martinů wrote his Fourth Symphony in the summer of 1945, in exile on Cape Cod, with the war finally ending and his hopes of returning to Czechoslovakia running high — hopes that would be crushed soon enough by the Communist takeover, but for the moment the music doesn’t know that yet. It fizzes with a kind of unguarded, sunlit optimism you don’t often find in this composer. Martin Turnovsky’s classic Czech account remains the benchmark for a reason: nobody has quite matched its idiomatic bounce, its sense that this music grows out of Moravian soil.

Tennstedt doesn’t try to out-Czech the Czechs. What he brings instead is symphonic weightiness, a structural rigor that treats Martinů as a serious contemporary of Hindemith and Honegger rather than a folkloric miniaturist who happened to write big pieces. The first movement crackles — genuinely crackles, the Stuttgart strings articulating those scampering triplet figures with real bite — and the second movement’s central Moderato is phrased by winds and strings alike with a songful warmth that never curdles into sentimentality. The slow movement, the symphony’s emotional core, gets an unusually spacious, atmospheric reading; Tennstedt lingers over its half-lit harmonic ambiguities in a way a conductor with less experience in Mahler and Bruckner might not think to do. It pays off. There’s real disquiet under the surface here, appropriately, given what Martinů and his fellow exiles didn’t yet know was coming.

The finale asks a great deal of the violins in its high-lying passagework, and here the Stuttgart section shows some strain, a thinning of tone at the top that a Czech or Berlin band might handle more comfortably. It’s a minor blemish on an otherwise persuasive traversal, and the rhythmic vitality of the closing pages carries the day regardless.

Should you buy this disc for the Brahms? Only if you don’t already own a Tennstedt First, in which case this is as