Portland Chamber Orchestra - Best Buddies - with music by Johannes Brahms

He described Brahms as the long-awaited successor to Beethoven, and in his influential music journal Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik hailed him as a genius "called forth to give us the highest expression of ideals in our time."

When Schumann suffered a nervous breakdown in 1853, Brahms returned to Düsseldorf to assist Clara Schumann and her family. Brahms developed a friendship with Clara that lasted until her death in 1896. Brahms described it as "the most beautiful experience of my life, its greatest wealth, its noblest content". Brahms held deep romantic affection for Clara which was probably never consummated.

Brahms occupies a peculiar position in the history of German romantic music. He was one of the first early music scholars, not only studying the masterpieces of Bach and Handel, but also resurrecting the works of Renaissance and early Baroque composers such as Gabrieli, Palestrina, and Schutz. He is regarded as the arch-conservative, the polar opposite of Wagner and Liszt's new ideals of music-drama and symphonic poems. He inherited the great Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition established by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, while extending it with the language of Romanticism. However, recent reappraisals of his work by composers such as Schoenberg and Webern have recognized him as a progressive, pioneering the new contrapuntal style that was to find its peak in the 12-tone works of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. But it is the essential accessibility of Brahms's music that has firmly placed him in the canon of great composers. He was a true man of the people, utilizing popular folk melodies and gypsy tunes. His music is about love, suffused with a melancholy romanticism that is totally unique.

The title "Serenade" that Brahms gave to the piece eventually published as his Opus 11 hints at the history behind the work. During two fruitful years spent at the ducal court of Detmold, Brahms had the opportunity to hear a great many examples of that lighter sort of entertainment music turned out by Mozart under such headings as cassation, serenade, or divertimento. The wind players of Prince Leopold's band demonstrated in these works the varied possibilities of the style. In homage to the older master and as an expression of his gratitude for their playing, Brahms composed a large chamber work of the serenade type for nine instruments, five winds and four strings.

As always in that period, he showed his newly completed works to his good friend Joseph Joachim, who opined that the nonet should really be expanded for chamber orchestra. Brahms took his advice--unfortunately destroying the original version in the process. The premiere took place at a court concert in Detmold; a public performance on March 28, 1859, was unfavorably received. As one of the papers reported, "If Brahms will learn to say what is in his heart plainly and straightforwardly, and not go out of his way to cut strange capers, the public will endorse Schumann's hopes and the laity will be able to understand what it is that professional musicians prize so highly in his works." That early review was typical of reaction to his music in the coming years--prized by a select group of connoisseurs, considered overly complex and difficult by the average music-lover.

Brahms enlarged the scoring still further to full orchestra (minus trombones). It was also received with indifference, though audiences on the whole soon began to accept this loving bow to the past. At a performance in Oldenburg two years later, a critic noted, "the applause reached a pitch of enthusiasm not hitherto experienced here." Such was not to be the case at the first Boston hearing of the Serenade when George Henschel, a friend of the composer's, led a performance in 1882. One paper reported, "The work on first hearing is generally unintelligible and not enjoyable," though the range of views was actually rather wide."

The Serenade in D also marked Brahms's arrival in Vienna. On November 14, 1862, only weeks after he had come for what was to be a short visit (but turned into a lifelong residency), the Serenade introduced the young composer to the milieu that was to dominate the rest of his life. Already, on this first acquaintance, Eduard Hanslick, the leading critic, recognized the scope and intellectual power of Brahms's composition, even in a relatively "light" form.

From beginning to end the Serenade reflects its composer's loving, careful study of the classics, not as something merely venerable, but as something to be celebrated through musical homage in a living tradition. The very first sonority immediately conjures up the Finale of Haydn's "London" Symphony, with its D-major pedal point in the lower strings and the statement of a jovial, folk like theme in the horn. But matters have not progressed far when Brahms, through a striking series of shifts of his pedal point, indicates to the alert listener that, however closely he may have made obeisance to the spirit of Haydn, he is planning a work on a far grander scale altogether. After building up to a restatement of the first theme in the full orchestra, progress to the secondary key brings in a new theme of extraordinary range in the violins, soaring upwards as it plays the composer's favorite rhythmic game of two-versus-three.

Serenades in Mozart's day had a string of varying movements following the opening Allegro. These included various dances, usually minuets, surrounding a central slow movement, a lively finale, and perhaps a few other dance movements scattered here and there. Brahms follows this pattern by putting a Scherzo between the opening Allegro and the slow movement, and then following the Adagio with two more movements in dance patterns. The Scherzo is an unusually elaborate one, making use of canonic techniques that few composers would choose to employ in a "light" movement, though Haydn, one of Brahms's likely models, would do so. The Adagio is unique in all of Brahms--a slow-movement sonata that is quite complete, even to a lengthy development and a full recapitulation and coda. The composer allows his love for luxuriant development full sway here in the twining thirds and sixths of the woodwinds against string tremolos, played off against a sensuous horn call. The paired Minuets seem to be final reflections of the earliest version of the Serenade, since they call for the same collection of instruments (except horn). Since so much of the orchestral scores hints, over and over again at chamber music textures, it is a charming surprise to find genuine chamber music in one of the movements. The horn, which has rested during the Menuetto, leads off the second Scherzo in a theme that immediately recalls early Beethoven. In fact, the Scherzo is a wonderful homage to the Opus 20 Septet and the Second Symphony, just as the first movement recalls Haydn. The Rondo finale brings the Serenade to an end in a burst of high spirits that recalls the penchant for long strings of dotted rhythms characteristic of another Brahms mentor, Robert Schumann.