Ravenna Festival
ORCHESTRA GIOVANILE LUIGI CHERUBINI
direttore KENT NAGANO
Within Brahms’s orchestral production, the Piano Concerto no. 1 and the Symphony no. 4 are the alpha and omega of the composer’s creative parable. The Concerto – hissed at its first performances as a complete fiasco – is the product of a prolonged gestation period during which 25-year old Brahms was infatuated with Clara Schumann (the second movement of the Concerto is actually her portrait in the form of an Adagio): this relationship evolved into a close friendship and came to an end in 1887, two years after the composition of Symphony no. 4, when they returned their letters to each other. On the other hand, the Fourth is the work of Brahms’s maturity, the culmination of his peculiar compositional technique: Schönberg would later coin the term “developing variation” to describe Brahms as one of the “progressive” music composers of the late XIX century.
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