This is horrendous. Daniel Harding hasn’t a clue about what Brahms should sound like, nor does he know how to render these symphonies even minimally expressive. He has the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen playing with a mechanical precision totally at odds with the sense of the music. In the Third, listen to the ineffectual non-happening he makes of the first movement’s second subject, the choppy phrasing, the lack of excitement at the recapitulation, and the coldly anemic string tone (nothing to do with sheer numbers). Has the rustic woodwind solo at the opening of the slow movement ever sounded so characterless, the ecstatic entry of the violins so void of expression, the central episode so lacking in mystery? Harding’s nasty truncating of the phrases of the third movement’s principal theme conveys about as much Romantic soulfulness as a little boy pulling the legs off of a bug. His finale cruises along on auto-pilot, its second subject totally lacking in nobility, the great central climax mercilessly hurried.
The Fourth Symphony fares just as poorly. The opening tune’s disconnected string of two-note sequences comes across as sound without sense. Harding’s treatment of the development section lacks any feeling for the drama or significance of Brahms’ thematic transformations. Note, for example, how charmlessly he rushes past the quizzical “sotto voce” query the winds make of the heroic third subject after Letter H. The Andante glides by at an undifferentiated mezzo-piano, its anodyne placidity more appropriate to music heard in elevators and department stores than in the concert hall. At least the third movement conveys some energy, but the hairpin crescendo/decrescendo opening of the concluding passacaglia demonstrates that when Harding does introduce his own ideas (Brahms marks the passage simply forte), they are likely to be bad ones. The remainder of the movement amounts to nothing more than a passionless exercise in orchestral sonority. Analytically clear recorded sound admirably conveys the desiccated string textures, clinically correct winds and brass, and cloddish timpani that combine to offer one of the most unmusical, unidiomatic, grotesque displays that this music has ever been forced to endure.
