Brahms: Tragic Overture (1942) Mengelberg/COA

Johannes Brahms Tragic Overture, Op. 81 Willem Mengelberg, conductor The Concertgebouw Orchestra Recorded on April 17, 1942 at The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam This past week there seems to be a lot of talk on the Web about all the things that Brahms wasn’t, with a lot of commentary about how his music was humorless, drab and un-interesting. One post on Facebook offered Tchaikovsky’s letters in which he made similar comments about the man, whom he personally did not like. Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions, but the jury has long since come back on both composers and found them both to have left music of immeasurable worth. It is interesting that composers who did not like each other’s music have been overruled by posterity, which feels no compulsion to take sides. As for Brahms, he certainly was not the kind of person that a fun loving Tchaikovsky could warm up to. Two men could not be more different. Tchaikovsky was the self-made musical genius who abandoned a career in accounting, and Brahms was a person who knew exactly what he wanted to do by the time he was six and could never be deterred from it. He was a man of few words about his music; one could take it or leave it as far as he was concerned. He burned most of what he wrote because it did not please him, and he shunned praise or popularity. As for the overture, he had only this to say: “I have written two overtures. One laughs, the other cries.“ One of the few topics BTW, that the two composers did agree on was Wagner. Neither man could stand him, but found his musical genius impossible to ignore. Field acoustic and sonic restoration (2024): Paul Howard - The Yucaipa Studio We do not monetize on this channel and our posts are commercial free. If you wish to offer support for this kind of music restoration you may do so at: