‘La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra’

‘A symphony is not a joke!’ For Johannes Brahms, composing a symphony was utterly serious and also a weighty task in which he constantly felt Beethoven, who had taken the genre to unprecedented heights, breathing down his neck. It was not until he was 43 that Brahms ventured to present his First Symphony, on which he had worked for more than fifteen years. When Hans von Bülow conducted the piece in 1876, he called it Beethoven’s tenth symphony. In the course of nine years, Brahms completed his set of four symphonies, all of which had identities entirely their own and were absorbed into the repertoire as great masterpieces. With their Classical-Romantic style, these works not only embody the legacy of Mozart and Beethoven, but also contained the germs of 20th-century music, above all that of Schoenberg. Alain Altinoglu is in his element in these key works from the repertoire, between Classicism and modernity.