Brahms Symphony No. 2 by Skrowaczewski

Brahms took his time with the Second Symphony. He had been carrying the weight of the First for more than twenty years — Beethoven’s ghost, the expectations of Schumann’s famous prophecy, the sheer terror of the symphonic form — and when he finally discharged that obligation in 1876, he turned around and wrote this one the following summer, in the Wörthersee air of Pörtschach, with what his friends described as uncommon ease. Clara Schumann called it “all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine, and cool green shadows.” She wasn’t wrong, exactly, but she left out the undertow.

That undertow is what separates the great performances from the merely pleasant ones.

Skrowaczewski understood this. The Pole was never a fashionable director in the way that Karajan was fashionable, never a personality cult the way Bernstein was — he was a composer himself, and it showed in the rigor of his structural thinking, the way he heard music from the inside out. His 1987 account with the Hallé, recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in digital sound of real warmth and presence, has been sitting around largely unnoticed, which is a small injustice worth correcting.

The opening of the first movement sets the terms immediately. Those low strings and horn — the D-major motif that seems to rise out of the earth itself — emerge with genuine gravity here, not prettified, not rushed past. Skrowaczewski takes the exposition repeat, which puts him in company with a generation of conductors that includes Haitink and Wand rather than the titans who came before: Toscanini, Furtwängler, Szell, Klemperer, Karajan — none of them bothered. The repeat matters. It gives the movement its proper weight, lets you hear how carefully Brahms has distributed his tonal centers, how the apparent pastoral serenity keeps getting undermined by chromatic slippage. At twenty-two minutes, Skrowaczewski is unhurried without being ponderous.

The Hallé in 1987 was not always the most polished ensemble in England — that would be stating the obvious too generously — but on this occasion the playing is terrific, genuinely so. Principal horn Laurence Rogers contributes some of the most mellifluous soft playing you’ll hear in this symphony: the horn writing in the first movement’s development, where Brahms lets the instrument carry the lyrical argument almost alone, comes off with a burnished, glowing quality that keeps the temperature just right. Skrowaczewski builds momentum through the development without anything that feels like urgency for its own sake. The architecture holds.

The Adagio is the movement that defeats conductors most reliably — it is never quite melancholy and never quite consoling, which means it is always both, and keeping those contradictions alive simultaneously requires a kind of emotional double vision that most interpreters simply don’t sustain. Skrowaczewski does. He doesn’t resolve the ambiguity. He lets it breathe. Rogers’s horn returns, dulcet again, before the stormier episodes arrive and the movement finds its serene, slightly mysterious close.

Then the Allegretto — and here Skrowaczewski is simply charming. There is genuine delicacy in the opening pastoral section, a real lift to the more playful passages that follow, and his lingering over the coda has nothing of self-indulgence about it; it feels earned. The finale he drives hard and joyously, which is exactly right. The dynamic shaping throughout is meticulous in a way that never calls attention to itself — pianissimi held pianissimo over long stretches, then the orchestra unleashed at full throat, the timpani absolutely let loose at the climax. It is thrilling in the way that live performances are supposed to be thrilling and recordings rarely are.

The Tragic Overture fills out the disc. I have never been able to make myself love it. Brahms himself seems to have been ambivalent — he wrote the Academic Festival Overture at the same time, apparently needing both a comedy and a tragedy to balance his accounts — but the Tragic has always struck me as a work that announces itself in the grandest possible terms and then fails to deliver anything proportionate to the announcement. Skrowaczewski gives it everything he has, and the reading is animated and committed, which only confirms my suspicion that the work itself is the problem. Brahms at his second-best.

No matter. The symphony is the point, and the symphony here is magnificent.