Les Dissonances: Brahms

About the Event

With Les Dissonances, the projects keep getting more and more ambitious. No sooner was the challenge taken up to perform Beethoven’s symphonies without conductor – and with what success! – than a new gamble, even more audacious, was begun: the symphonies of Brahms! After a Fourth last season, now it is the monumental First they attempt to scale.

It took 20 years for Brahms to complete this score, all too keenly aware of the full weight it represented for any composer following in the giant footsteps of Beethoven. A rough draft was begun in 1854, shortly after his fateful meeting with Schumann, but it was not until 1876 that he would go back and complete the symphony. Staggering in its complexity, with an impressively sized orchestra, reaching a culmination right at the outset and tracing its subsequent steps almost without respite, it is perhaps the most difficult of the four: at its premiere, all agreed that it was nothing more nor less than a veritable Tenth by Beethoven! At age 43, Brahms made an exalted entrance into the world of the symphony, as a force that henceforth could never be ignored.