Gardiner conducts Brahms

Brahms was fourteen when he conducted his first choir – granted, it was a local male choir in a nearby pub, but still. The gentlemen even performed works by their young conductor. Brahms later founded his own women’s choir, thereby gaining invaluable experience as a conductor and composer. He chose rigorous Renaissance and Baroque composers as his models, yet dressed this tradition in an unmistakably Romantic guise.  

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra and his very own Monteverdi Choir, will illuminate Brahms’s learning trajectory as echoed in the Third Symphony. It opens with the catchy notes F–A-flat–F, a reference to Brahms’s own bachelor motto ‘frei aber froh’, or free yet happy. That freedom has a slight hint of melancholy to it, too, as can be heard most clearly in the poignant second movement. Cantabile!