I think I've figured out what makes Nagano's Brahms 4 so different. He makes the symphony sound so ... well ... Brahmsian.
What has, or had, always struck me about this symphony is how different it is from the other 3. The first three Brahms symphonies seem to be a matching set of sorts, and they have an awful lot in common or sometimes seem to cross-quote each other (like the motto theme of the Second deriving from a bit of material in the First). The slow movements I sometimes mix up; listening to the works in tandem one can pick out all the items from Brahms' compositional bag of tricks. And I'd never quite seen the Fourth in the same light. It's (for this listener at least) on a different plane.
But then the past couple mornings during the walk to school I'd been going over the Fourth in my head trying to figure out (and eventually sort of "getting it") what everyone's talking about when they say the material from the first movement appears in the finale. And an accidental byproduct was a growing realization that those good old Brahmsian tricks from the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies really were present in the Fourth - started to see how it fit into the cycle. And along comes Nagano. His performance of the Symphony is coupled with Schoenberg, but oddly, his Fourth looks backward at the other three symphonies; he seems to "round the edges" of the first three movements, brings out the lines being played "within" the orchestra, and generally highlights elements of the symphony which make it more easily relatable to the other three. The first three movements are rather tame in comparison with, say, Ormandy/Philadelphia (on the Great Conductors reissue series). But the finale is terrific. And I've never heard the symphony this way before. Food for thought, but now I'm putting on Carlos Kleiber's Vienna recording ... with a twist! This is from 1979, not 1981, a live recording captured by Golden Melodram. Not quite like the legendary DG album.
