(No. XXVII of the Thirty-fourth Winter Series) Relayed from the New Pavilion, Bournemouth
The Bournemouth Municipal Augmented Orchestra
Conducted by Mr. Norman Demuth and Sir Dan Godfrey
Brahms's two Serenades for Orchestra appeared in 1860, when he was only twenty-seven. In the previous year he had brought out his Pianoforte Concerto in D Minor in Leipzig, and had met with a perfect storm of opposition. His own playing, more concerned with the big-ness of the conception than with accuracy in detail, has been blamed for the failure of the Concerto, but its departure from tradition and its own uncompromising earnestness had probably more to do with that. Not until Madame Schumann and Brahms himself had played it again and again did it win its way to favour, and even now it is easy to realize that some of its passages must have sounded a little uncouth.
The two Serenades are so much simpler and slighter, both in texture and in character, that some have thought Brahms must have been trying in that way to overcome the prejudices against his Concerto. But it would be easy to make too much of that; he was not one who was easily swayed by popular verdicts, favourable or otherwise, and it is much more probable that the simple and straightforward melodiousness of the Serenades was a perfectly sincere expression of what he meant them to tell us. The one in A is remarkable as requiring no violins in the orchestra; the team employed is throughout quite a small one.
(First Performance)
(Conducted by the Composer)
(Soloist, Lloyd Powell)
