Andrew Clements

Brahms: Complete Symphonies album review – period-instrument plushness with modern-instrument refinement

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Gardiner
(Deutsche Grammophon)
In recordings taken from live performances, John Eliot Gardiner conducts the RCO in taut and purposeful readings

Many years before he severed his connections with the period-instrumental ensembles and choir that he founded, John Eliot Gardiner had recorded the Brahms symphonies with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. In that Brahms Project in 2007 and 2008, he made a “reappraisal of Brahms’s sound world and ... the close link between the symphonies and Brahms’s choral works”. Returning to the works nearly two decades later in this new cycle, taken from concerts in which he conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in their Amsterdam home in 2021 to 2023, his priorities were different: “To build on that seminal earlier experience and to extend its finding and interpretations to/in working with a modern orchestra”.