Mengelberg: Academic Festival Overture; Tragic Overture; Symphony no. 3 in F Major; Symphony no. 1 in C Minor (third movement)
Concertgebouw Orchestra; Willem Mengelberg, conductor.
Naxos 8.110932. Recorded 1930–42, Amsterdam. Transfers by Ward Marston. CD.
The question isn’t whether Mengelberg took liberties with Brahms—he did, constantly—but whether those liberties illuminate or distort. On this Naxos disc, drawing from Columbia and Telefunken masters spanning 1930 to 1942, the answer tilts decisively toward illumination. Ward Marston’s transfers honor the originals without pretending they’re something they aren’t; there’s hiss, particularly on the 1942 Telefunken Tragic Overture, but nothing that obscures the extraordinary music-making underneath.
The Academic Festival Overture from 1930 arrives not as a genial romp through student songs but as something darker, more searching. That opening really does tread furtively—Mengelberg’s strings are almost conspiratorial, and the whole performance bristles with an expectancy that never quite resolves into celebration. The winds, when they enter with “Gaudeamus igitur,” sound less like revelers than philosophers contemplating youth from a distance. It’s an odd performance, maybe even perverse, but it gets under your skin.
But the Third Symphony—recorded in May 1931, when Mengelberg had been at the Concertgebouw for thirty-six years—this is why we return to these old recordings. The first movement surges with an urgency that never tips into haste. Listen to how the strings negotiate the secondary theme: there’s flexibility, yes, even portamento that would make a modern orchestra blanch, but it’s all in service of a larger architectural vision. The phrase shapes feel inevitable even as they’re being freshly discovered.
And those winds. The "Andante" opens with oboe and clarinet solos that seem to breathe the phrases rather than merely play them. The articulation is so refined, the tonal blend so perfectly calibrated, that you understand immediately why this orchestra’s wind section was legendary. Mengelberg lets them sing—really sing—without sentimentality.
The Poco allegretto moves with what I can only describe as autumnal warmth. Not nostalgia, exactly, but a kind of wistful acceptance. The tempo is judicious, never lingering but allowing each phrase its full expressive weight. By the time we reach the "finale", Mengelberg has built such momentum that the concluding pages feel genuinely cathartic. This is Brahms as a Romantic, not a classicist in Romantic clothing.
The fragment from the First Symphony—just the third movement, recorded as a coupling for the 78 set—tantalizes. It’s fleet but never shallow, rhythmically alert without being rigid. Those principal winds again display astonishing character and unanimity of phrasing. One wishes desperately for the complete symphony, though live performances have surfaced over the years.
That 1942 Tragic Overture, for all its surface noise, burns with an intensity that feels almost prophetic given the circumstances of its recording. This is Brahms at his most vehement, the dark recesses explored without flinching. The performance has a blazing, almost desperate quality—listen to the string attacks in the central section, the way the brass cut through with almost brutal force. Nothing comfortable or bourgeois here.
These recordings document an approach to Brahms that’s largely vanished: interventionist, emotionally direct, built on decades of collective understanding between maestro and orchestra. Modern ears may balk at the tempo modifications, the portamento, the sheer subjectivity of it all. But there’s a coherence to Mengelberg’s vision, a sense that every liberty serves an expressive purpose rather than mere caprice.
At Naxos’s price, this is an essential document. Not a relic—a living testament to a tradition we’ve perhaps too readily abandoned.
