Many years ahead of he severed his connections with the length-instrumental ensembles and choir that he based, John Eliot Gardiner had recorded the Brahms symphonies along with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. In that Brahms Challenge in 2007 and 2008, he made a “reappraisal of Brahms’s sound world and … the end hyperlink between the symphonies and Brahms’s choral works”. Returning to the works almost two a long time later in this original cycle, taken from concert events in which he performed the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of their Amsterdam home in 2021 to 2023, his priorities had been diverse: “To kind on that seminal earlier abilities and to lengthen its discovering and interpretations to/in working with a most modern orchestra”.

Indubitably the disagreement of sound worlds between the length strings and wind on Gardiner’s feeble recording and the plush richness of the RCO, one of the valuable sphere’s nice ensembles, is marked, but in loads of respects the performances are an identical; there’s a litheness to the style, a refusal to get distracted by subsidiary detail from the basic symphonic argument, and a technique of continuously conserving the event taut and purposeful. In these performances, Gardiner manages to indulge in his length-instrument cake and indulge in his in style-instrument refinement in a implies that’s fully convincing.

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