Brahms: Violin Concerto

Johannes Brahms (Composer), Eugene Ormandy (Conductor), Philadelphia Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Philadelphia Orchestra
• Conductor: Eugene Ormandy
• Composer: Johannes Brahms
• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B0000025MT
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,851 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly Brahmsian!!!, May 9, 2005

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Interplanetary Funksmanship "Swift lippin', e... (Vanilla Suburbs, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brahms: Violin Concerto (Audio CD)

If anyone - and I doubt they can still get away with it - wishes to claim that Eugene Ormandy had a "one size fits all" method of conducting, I entreat them to find a more Brahmsian, more Germanic, rendering of the third B's violin concerto than this recording. Eugene Ormandy's treatment of its opening phrases is at once so disciplined yet pliant - with the setup of the same sense of majestic forbearance and layered tonality he brings to his recordings of Brahms' symphonies. The tenuous overlapping of the strings with the winds alone is a textbook example of instrumental balance. Listeners can clearly understand why Ormandy was so renowned as a peerless colloborator. And this overwhelming tidal wave of sound comes even before Stern's violin has uttered a note!

Too often, I have heard other maestros conduct a concerto indifferently, on the mistaken assumption that it is, after all, the soloist's opportunity to shine -- not the orchestra's -- least of all, the conductor's. Such a passive approach runs counter to the composer's intentions; especially one such as Brahms, whose musical statements are of symphonic proportions, even in his concertos and sonatas (his First Piano Concerto was originally drafted as a symphony). Ormandy presents Stern with the proverbial "tough act to follow."

Isaac Stern's genius lies in the fact that with the singular voice of his violin he rises to the challenge -- and surpasses it. His violin cuts through the orchestra sharp as a stiletto, and never lets up in heightening the sense of drama.

Ormandy's genius lies in the fact that the orchestra's accompaniment never overwhelms Stern's violin, yet also never fades into the background, either; Ormandy's is a sympathetic and holistic approach, fluid in tempo and accommodating in dynamics in providing the perfect counter-balance to Stern's performance.

Stern and Ormandy performed and recorded many great concerti together while both were with Columbia: Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, both of Prokofieff's. Stern always had the highest praise for Ormandy's uncanny ability to anticipate a solist's nuances. "Gene becomes an extension of your own phrasing and music making," Stern said in 1979. "It's almost as if he were taking part in your bowing as you play, because subtleties in pressure and phrasing -- if you're playing well you do them spontaneously -- he responds to instantly, even a millisecond ahead of time.

"I've often said," he joked, "that if you were going to catch cold and sneeze next week, Ormandy would already be there with a handkerchief -- you didn't know it was going to happen, but he did." Nowhere is this seamless melding of musical minds so apparent between the two than on this landmark performance.

Of all the recordings I've heard of this concerto, none can match Stern's and Ormandy's sense of tension-and-release, which is sustained from the introduction through the finale . It is, by far, the most intellectual performance I've heard -- yet so sanguine, so melodic. There is nothing sloppy or extraneous in Stern's playing: It is pure logic, an exacting rendition in which Stern is in command of every note. Like Heifetz' recording with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony (1958), this recording is very up-tempo. Yet, unlike Heifetz -- who sometimes dashes through a passage so quickly that he glosses over notes -- every note is endowed with purpose and intent.

The finale is breathtakingly bold, without ever being brash. It's one of the best examples of sustained and controlled passion I've heard on records -- akin to God holding a force of nature in his bare hands, unleashing it at the peak of its potency.

Both Stern and Ormandy thus have produced a musical document that speaks profoundly towards the respect and awe both men had before Brahms' oeuvre: I cannot tell the difference between Stern's approach towards the work and Ormandy's. Both musicians seem to be channeling the weighty and commanding German composer, but without getting bogged down in stale, scholarly, interpretation. Their passion for Brahms comes through with a clarity one usually associates with the iconoclastic composers, such as Mahler or Satie.

Recorded in 1959, this recording is one of the earliest stereophonic recordings in either Stern's or Ormandy's career. On the compact disc, though, you can't tell: The microphones catch every nuance every raspy bass and 'cello string, the ring of the brass, the rush of the wind as its passes through the flutes and the full range of Isaac Stern's virtuosic expression on his very dolce Guarnerius del Gesu.

This is a recording for the ages: It entertains, thrills and inspires.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stern and Ormandy in their glory days, November 11, 2007

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Santa Fe Listener (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brahms: Violin Concerto (Audio CD)

Given that Sony has repackaged it for twenty years in half a dozen guises, this Brahms concerto from Stern and Ormandy has probably circulated mroe widely in America than any other (its chief rival being the classic Heifetz/Reiner recording on RCA). At their height in the Sixties Stern and Ormandy were publicized everywhere, including on national television, along with Bernstein, as cultural icons for a post-war generation just coming to terms with classical music.

It could have turned out that these stars weren't as good as advertized, but in this case they ere. Stern's tone and phrasing are impeccable. Ormandy provides gorgeous, relaxed accompaniment. I won't go so far as to say that Stern's account is as dazzling as Kremer's, as inward as Menuhin's, or as commanding as Oistrakh's, Heifetz's and Mullova's. He's a bit faceless, and Ormandy doesn't rise to the heights of a Furtwangler, Bernstein, or Karajan. But on its own terms this straightforward, very "American" performance, which eschews all pretentiousness, delivers the goods.

5.0 out of 5 stars THE SOUL OF MUSIC, January 21, 2012

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DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brahms: Violin Concerto (Audio CD)

Only 40 minutes of music on this disc, but I beg you not to equate quantity with value. I would have paid ten times as much as I did for what I have here, because I believe, soberly and literally and after decades of revisiting this performance on my vinyl LP, that it is the most perfect concerto performance I have ever listened to.

Quite a claim, that, and it has taken me 40 years to dare to make it. One thing that I have in mind is the sheer confidence that both soloist and conductor show in despatching the more or less non-stop series of challenges that the work presents as if they have been put on earth to show us how it should all be done. The tempo and tone of the opening phrase on the violas are exactly right, and the delicate suggestion of a yodel in the cadence (the work was composed in Switzerland) is handled to perfection as well as being discreet in sound and precise in ensemble. Fast forward to the soloist's entry, and the descending octaves are again spot-on in tempo, declamatory but neither rushed nor allowed to become stodgy. Nearly all performances do justice to the change into major harmony, with the sigh from the orchestra and the little yodelling call from the violin, but I have to mention it because it is such a lovely moment and because of Stern's exquisite timing of the reintroduction of the main melody. `Unhurried speed, majestic instancy' or words to that effect in The Hound if Heaven would make a good description of the first movement altogether. The slow movement is sublime, just slightly slower than average, and the finale is magnificent - not just in Stern's assured delivery of the theme, but all the way to the march-effect in the closing section.

Tchaikovsky complained that Brahms's music lacked beauty, from which I infer that he had probably heard some similar performances of it to a few that I have been subjected to. In a review of a single work I don't (thank goodness) have to deal with the question as a general proposition. However what I will say is that in the right performance Brahms's violin concerto is a more beautiful thing than anything by even the great Tchaikovsky, much as I admire him. It is the sheer beauty of the piece, as well as the sense of rightness that I have been claiming for the performance, that is the impression that lasts with me, and has lasted for many years. Age does not wither this account of what is surely one of the towering musical peaks of the 19th century.

The performance is from Philadelphia in 1959, and the sound is in perfectly adequate if not spectacular ADD. There is a liner-note that is slightly less than adequate, I am sorry to report. I sometimes complain in reviews about liner comment that just tells us what we can perfectly well hear for ourselves, but this one does not even rise to elementary accuracy in what it says about the first movement. No use looking here for insight into a fascinating question that I hardly ever see mentioned, namely whether the `scherzo' of the second piano concerto started life as a movement for the violin work. The key would be right (D minor), and the theme is very plausible as a violin theme. By way of background, Brahms had been working on the piano concerto but put it aside for the violin concerto, which appeared with a head-start of 6 opus-numbers. My own theory is that the composer decided that such an innovation would not be in keeping with the violin concerto. The second piano concerto is a work full of profound experiments in harmony, rhythm and formal structure: the violin concerto, for all its blazing inspiration, is nothing of the kind. It is ostentatiously `traditional', even down to leaving blanks for cadenzas in the outer movements, but Brahms being Brahms he is nowhere near as conservative as some think, Schoenberg for one being a conspicuous exception.

So three movements is all we get, but three marvellous movements - pure `absolute' music indifferent to the literary and descriptive tendencies that music was succumbing to on every hand. I own other distinguished performances of this great work, I have heard many more still but not yet one to equal this one, and time may be running out for that to happen.