Philippe Herreweghe really ought not to be conducting romantic orchestral music. He has no feeling for it at all. In the baroque works on which his reputation rests, he can achieve stunning results. I wouldn’t trade in his version of, say, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or the Monteverdi Vespers for anything, but leaving aside for the moment his own deficiencies as a conductor, the very notion of Brahms on period instruments is silly. We have no need to rediscover the “authentic” sound of this music; the true Brahms tradition was alive and well far into the LP era in the hands of Brahms’ contemporaries as various as Monteux, Walter, Abendroth, Furtwängler, Toscanini, and numerous others. Diddling the type of strings, the presence or absence of brass valves, and other such gimmicks cannot compensate absent great conducting.
And that, of course, is the point. It is far easier to be an effective conductor in baroque music for the simple reason that it was not written to be “conducted”, in the modern sense. Most of the work specialist conductors today do in earlier repertoire happens in advance: preparing an edition, working out the mechanics of texture, balance, and ornamentation, fixing the size of the performing forces, and other such preliminaries. Then, no matter how much handwaving and gesticulating goes on in performance, the conductor basically pushes the start button and lets the music go. His work is done, and his role becomes that of mere accompanist to the virtuosic solo voices on top, whether vocal, choral, or instrumental. Certainly this requires intelligence, sensitivity, perhaps even talent, but it’s a proposition very different from controlling the evolving dramatic syntax of a Brahms symphony in real time.
All of this is a long way of saying that Herreweghe is a bad Brahms conductor. Every movement in this performance sounds rushed, as distinct from being merely quick. Stokowski in his RCA recording of this symphony is quick. “Rushed” happens when you combine speed with a mechanical stiffness of rhythm that gives the music a feeling of asthmatic desperation (and I have asthma, so I would know). Herreweghe’s conducting sounds chronically short of breath. This robs the climaxes of the first and third movements of their necessary power, turns some of the quicker bits of the finale into a scramble, and shortchanges the Andante moderato’s bardic lyricism by ignoring the “moderato” directive. Add to that scruffy and undernourished strings, sorely lacking in Brahmsian richness of tone, and the result is just poor.
The two vocal works are another matter: Herreweghe as a choral accompanist in this music is closer to being in his element, and in the Alto Rhapsody Ann Hallenberg sings affectingly–but no one is buying this disc for those pieces. In this music especially, with its long and illustrious history on disc, a period pick-up ensemble like the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées under a clearly inadequate conductor can’t possibly be competitive. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
