Lieben Sie Brahms

«A couple of entr’actes are lying around – what one in combination usually calls a symphony», wrote Johannes Brahms with cryptic irony in 1885 to his friend, the conductor Hans von Bülow, from his summer holiday in Mürzzuschlag. «It tastes of the local climate – the cherries don’t get sweet here; you wouldn’t eat them!» Naturally Brahms was exaggerating here, as ever. One only need think of the radiant E major in the strings in the slow movement or of the irrepressible joy in the Allegro giocoso that follows it. But there’s a grain of truth in his words about this, his final symphony. What secrets it hides, with what ingenious compositional strategies this great work looks both to the future and the past – all this will be revealed by the Tonkunstler Orchestra under the baton of the young German conductor Jascha von der Goltz, together with Albert Hosp.