Turning Brahms’ Clock Back

That classical music is so eager to celebrate the deaths of composers can certainly strike some of us as morbid. At best, it’s not a very good image for an art form already perceived to be more weighted in the past than the present.

Yet thinking about Brahms 100 years after his death in 1897 makes sense. He died at a time not unlike our own. A century was turning, and Europe, in particular, was obsessed with the notions of a modern age. If magazines like the New Yorker or Wired had been around then, laboring over the question of what’s next, Brahms would have proved an interesting lightning rod.

Was he the last Romantic or the first modern? Would the next century want innovations founded on classical beliefs and thus model itself after Brahms, or would it want to overthrow the past altogether?

Those sorts of questions (Is the avant-garde dead? Is retro news?) are still with us in our music, literature, art, film and even furniture design. Brahms is still very much with us as well. And Michael Steinberg, the music annotator and lecturer who served as an enlightening guide through the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Brahms Experience” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last weekend began his introduction in the program book by reminding us that Brahms’ four symphonies are ever with us.

It is the “ever” that was the point of the weekend, which centered around performances of the four Brahms symphonies conducted by Roger Norrington, but also included an open rehearsal, lectures, discussions, chamber music, vocal music, heavy Hamburg winter food in 100-degree downtown temperatures and free T-shirts to the die-hards who weathered it all.

It has long been the mission of Norrington--who began his popular “Experiences” (intensive looks into a work or composer) in London 15 years ago--to clean the cobwebs away from classical repertory. But the controversies are the same as those surrounding the cleaning of great classical paintings and frescoes. Do we really want Michelangelo in bright colors, or is the darkness accumulated over time a more appropriate way to understand our relationship to the past?

The “Brahms Experience” offered no answers. At their best, Norrington’s Brahms performances are fresh, energetic, exhilarating. He has a marvelous command of rhythm. He conducts in exciting bursts of energy. The sound he gets from an orchestra is arresting. Looking to history, he noticed that orchestras in Brahms’ day emphasized woodwind more than we do today. They also separated violins and brass instruments on opposite sides of the stage, eager for dramatic interplay between parts.

Textures were thinner, more brazen and tempos faster, and that, too, is what Norrington is after, creating a much more brittle and brazen Brahms than we are usually used to. And it can be a lot more fun. The Philharmonic players and excited audiences for the performances of the First and Second symphonies (Saturday night) and the Third and Fourth (Sunday afternoon) responded as if this were a wake-up call. For too long, we have been more comfortable with Brahms’ classical side than his progressive leanings.

But the entire “Brahms Experience,” which also included a song recital by Gundula Janowitz and a Sunday morning performance of Brahms String Quintet No. 2 by members of the orchestra, told a more confusing postmodern story.

For instance, the musical examples Steinberg chose as illustrations for his talks included performances from the ‘30s by cellist Pablo Casals and bass Alexander Kipnis (both born while Brahms was still alive) and the devastatingly personal playing of clarinetist Reginald Kell. Yet their style, as compelling as it is, is said to be inauthentic, whereas Norrington’s approach, so modern in its feel, is history-based.

To further muck up matters, Janowitz, an opera singer popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s but less prominent in the last decade, offered a stunning recital of Brahms songs delivered with statuesque understatement that is the very antithesis of the more actorish “modern” vocal recital style. Yet Janowitz, who at 60 sounds just as magnificent vocally as she did 25 years ago, got so deeply into the inner quality of the music that she left hardly an eye dry in the house. Grant Gershon was her sensitive accompanist.

The Philharmonic chamber musicians offered yet another kind of modernity, a more ordinary, slightly faceless one. They suffered by comparison with the ‘30s greats not only in terms of interpretation, but also because their instruments lacked the presence of amplified recordings in the Pavilion’s bland acoustics.

The Pavilion was also Norrington’s enemy. We heard so much about how Brahms was special for the energy he gave to the middle of the orchestra, to the sound of the violas and cellos. Yet following Brahms’ seating arrangement in a modern hall meant losing those instruments more often than not.

But maybe that was ultimately all part of the meaning of the weekend. We have never reconciled the modern and antique sides of Brahms’ nature, and our modern world doesn’t seem to be much help.

* Roger Norrington and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will reprise Brahms’ Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4, Wednesday night at 7:30, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $8-$63. (213) 850-2000.