Brahms Symphonies 1 and 3 – Saraste

Ghosts get everywhere in Brahms, and Cologne knows how to let them in without turning up the theatrics.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste has been quietly rebuilding the WDR Sinfonieorchester’s reputation for years now, away from the glare that follows the Berlin and Vienna orchestras around, and this pairing of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68, and the Symphony No. 3 in F major, op. 90, arrives with the slightly breathless quality of something captured on the wing — live, at the Kölner Philharmonie in January, patched afterward in sessions that (one hopes) smoothed the odd smudged entrance without sanding off the electricity. Radio listeners got it in April. Concertgoers who paid their extra twelve euros got it in the mail after Easter, an arrangement that made me think, not unkindly, of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Day operation — capture the moment, sell the moment, before the moment cools.

The First Symphony’s opening measures — those timpani strokes, tolling under a string line that claws upward against them — still function as a kind of dare. Brahms took two decades getting here. He told Hermann Levi he could feel Beethoven’s tread behind him the whole way, and Hans von Bülow’s crack about a “Tenth Symphony” has calcified into cliché precisely because it isn’t wrong. Saraste doesn’t try to out-thunder Klemperer, and good for him — that Philharmonia release remains a force of nature nobody since has quite matched for sheer granitic weight, and chasing it is a losing game. What Saraste offers instead is proportion. The horns have body without barking. The oboe’s rising figure a couple minutes into the first movement gets space to breathe, phrased with real tenderness rather than dispatched as connective tissue. There’s darkness here, yes, and menace, but it’s German Romantic menace filtered through a Finnish sensibility that trusts the architecture to do the frightening for you.

The Andante sostenuto glows amber rather than gold — a burnished, autumnal thing, the winds contributing some genuinely lovely coloring, oboe and clarinet trading lines like old colleagues who’ve stopped needing to prove anything to each other. When the concertmaster’s solo violin rises up near the movement’s close, the ear travels involuntarily toward the Violin Concerto, written not long after; Brahms was recycling his own weather patterns, and Saraste lets you hear the family resemblance without underlining it in red pen.

Then the third movement — Un poco allegretto e grazioso, marked, and how rarely orchestras actually let it be grazioso rather than merely brisk. Here it sways. It has real charm, almost Mendelssohnian lightness, dew still on it. You could set a walking tour of the Vienna Woods to this movement and no one would question your itinerary. The finale’s slow introduction broods convincingly — trombones entering like a held breath finally released — before the famous horn theme (Clara Schumann’s alphorn tune, Brahms’s postcard from the Rigi) breaks through with genuine sunlight rather than the varnished triumphalism some conductors mistake for the same thing.

The Third Symphony gets a reading that’s arguably even more successful, because this piece punishes bombast faster than the First does. Its opening gesture — that motto, F-A-flat-F, planted by horns and winds over surging strings — needs urgency without hysteria, and Saraste finds it. The famous third-movement “Poco ”allegretto, that melancholy waltz-that-isn’t-quite-a-waltz which every film composer since 1945 has quietly stolen from, is shaped with an unforced rubato that never curdles into sentimentality. Cellos carry the tune with a plain, almost confessional tone — no extra vibrato smeared on for effect. It’s the sound of an orchestra that has played this piece a hundred times and has stopped needing to sell it to itself.

Where does this leave the recording in a field crowded with Karajan’s velvet, Wand’s granite, Gardiner’s lean period-informed urgency, Chailly’s brilliant modern Leipzig traversal? Comfortably mid-table in terms of fame, considerably higher in terms of sheer listenability. Saraste isn’t reinventing Brahms. He’s not trying to. He gives you a Brahms that trusts the notes, plays them with warmth and unforced intelligence, and lets a very good German orchestra sound like exactly that. The engineering captures hall bloom without murk — you can hear the difference between a live acoustic and a patched one if you listen for the seams, and I did listen, and mostly failed to find them.

Not a first choice for a desert island. But a genuinely satisfying traveling companion, and one I’d happily return to on an ordinary Tuesday evening, which is, in the end, when most of us actually listen to Brahms.