Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No 4 in E minor, Op 98 [39:04]
Sir James MACMILLAN (b. 1959)
Larghetto for Orchestra (2009, orch. 2017) [14:56]
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck
rec. live composite, 27-29 October, 2017 (MacMillan); 20-22 April, 2018 (Brahms), Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts, Pittsburgh, USA
REFERENCE RECORDINGS FR-744 SACD [54:00]
The pairing seems odd at first—Brahms’s farewell to the symphony and MacMillan’s elegiac orchestra piece, written for the centenary of Fatima. But Manfred Honeck understands something about endings, about mortality made audible through string tone and brass chorale.
His Brahms Fourth is magnificent. Not safe, not upholstered—magnificent in the old sense, with grandeur that earns its keep through intellectual rigor and orchestral transparency. The opening theme emerges from the Pittsburgh strings with that particular sheen this ensemble has developed under Honeck, a burnished clarity that lets you hear into the music’s cellular structure. Those falling thirds don’t merely descend; they spiral downward with the inevitability of autumn leaves, each one catching light differently.
The first movement’s architecture reveals itself with unusual logic here. Honeck takes the exposition repeat—thank goodness—and uses it to deepen our understanding of Brahms’s motivic economy rather than simply giving us more of the same. The development section builds with controlled ferocity; the winds, especially the oboes and clarinets, articulate their countermelodies with a precision that would make Brahms himself weep with gratitude. This is chamber music thinking applied to symphonic forces.
But it’s the finale that stops you cold.
Honeck’s passacaglia unfolds with the inexorable tread of Greek tragedy. Each variation adds another layer of psychological complexity—the pizzicato variation genuinely whispers, the flute variation achieves genuine pathos without sentimentality. When the trombones enter for their chorale statement, you feel the weight of Protestant hymnody, of Bach, of everything Brahms carried within him. The final pages, with their brass ablaze, sound both triumphant and devastated. Reference Recordings captures it all in demonstration-quality sound that never turns clinical; you can hear the hall’s warmth, the players’ breath.
The MacMillan Larghetto—originally for string quartet, here in the composer’s own orchestral expansion—makes more sense following the Brahms than you’d expect. MacMillan writes with an ear for harmonic stasis and glacial transformation that echoes late Brahms, though his language is thoroughly contemporary. The piece unfolds in long, sustained paragraphs of sound, achingly radiant in its restraint. The Pittsburgh strings play it with the kind of focused intensity that suggests they’ve internalized its devotional character.
Does it entirely work as an orchestral piece? I’m not convinced the expansion adds what it needs to add—the quartet original has an intimacy that resists this kind of inflation. But Honeck conducts it with absolute conviction, shaping its long lines with the same care he brings to Brahms. The disc, made six months earlier than the symphony, catches the Heinz Hall acoustic in slightly different perspective; you notice the difference if you’re listening critically, though it hardly matters in practice.
What matters is that Honeck has given us a Brahms Fourth that belongs in the argument. It won’t replace the Kleiber, the Furtwängler, the Carlos Kleiber—but it stands alongside them, offering insights those performances don’t. The slow movement’s central climax, for instance, achieves a shattering directness that even Kleiber’s nervous intensity doesn’t quite match. And the scherzo’s trio section, often treated as mere relief, here becomes a moment of genuine if fleeting joy before the darkness returns.
This is essential listening for anyone who cares about how Brahms sounds in the twenty-first century.
