Humility & Exuberance – Great Symphonies

Symphony Concert

Saturday, 26 August 2023
7.30 pm, Gstaad Festival Tent

Johannes Brahms showed humility towards his great role models (Bach in particular) as well as towards his peers. The creative process of his Violin Concerto is a fine example, in which he relied with great abnegation – he was indeed not a violinist but a pianist – on the wise (and sometimes severe) advice of his friend Joseph Joachim to bring it to completion, with the success we all know. Even more tricky is the great “exposure” represented by the remote confrontation with Beethoven's legacy (judged by many to be unsurpassable) in the great classical forms: concerto, string quartet, and even more so in the symphonic register … or when humility becomes an obstacle to the expression of one's own creativity. In spite of a process that took more than fifteen years to complete, success is at the end of the road – at the end of the effort! – And it is indeed a Brahms symphony, even if some, like the conductor Hans von Bülow, aim to flatter him by evoking … Beethoven's Tenth! Modest to the end, the composer had taken every precaution with regard to the judgement of posterity by not conducting the first performance himself in the Viennese “lion's den”, but by entrusting the premiere to the conductor Felix Otto Dessoff and the Grand-Ducal Orchestra of Karlsruhe.

» Discovery program – Concert+