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”.
Certainly the contrast of sound worlds between the period strings and wind on Gardiner’s old recording and the plush richness of the RCO, one of the world’s great ensembles, is marked, but in many respects the performances are similar; there’s a litheness to the approach, a refusal to get distracted by subsidiary detail from the essential symphonic argument, and a sense of always keeping the structure taut and purposeful. In these performances, Gardiner manages to have his period-instrument cake and enjoy his modern-instrument refinement in a way that is totally convincing.
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