Relayed from the National Museum of Wales
National Orchestra of Wales
(Cerddorfa Genedlaethol Cymru)
Brahms' 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 bigness 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 ho 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.
This effective ballet music has very little to do with the story of 'Philemon and Baucis,' but in the age in which it was produced, no French opera dared dispense with a ballet, and this intrudes on the action of the tale appropriately enough. Listeners will remember that the little opera tells how Jupiter and Vulcan come down from Olympus, and, overtaken by a storm of Jupiter's own devising, seek shelter in the house of the aged couple, Philemon and Baucis. In gratitude for their hospitality, Jupiter grants them a renewal of their youth, with results which not even ho had foreseen. Baucis becomes so charming a maid that the god loses his heart to her, until Philemon, foreseeing disaster to his happiness, begs that they may once more be made old. Jupiter, swayed by a generous impulse, abandons his amorous design, consents to leave the two in happiness, with their newly regained youth.
(to 14.00)
