A quiet farewell to Herbert Blomstedt opened an evening of Brahms that combined reflection with exuberance. Under Fabio Luisi, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra showed how tradition can harbour a continuing process of renewal — in the music and among the musicians who play it.
By Anders Beyer
Thursday Concert, 5 November 2026, DR Koncerthuset, Copenhagen.
Stenhammar: Interlude from Sången, Op. 44.
Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg.
Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98.
Danish National Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Fabio Luisi.
A quiet farewell
The recently deceased conductor Herbert Blomstedt had a special relationship with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. As its chief conductor from 1967 to 1977, and subsequently as honorary conductor, he spent decades refining its sound, precision and depth of musical understanding. The Thursday Concert opened with a quiet tribute: the interlude from Sången, a cantata by his Swedish compatriot Wilhelm Stenhammar.
The mood was set. A dignified farewell to a conductor who had provided a living connection between generations of musicians. Admired for his thoroughness, modesty and persistence, and for his ability to draw the best from an orchestra with the smallest of gestures.
Stenhammar and Brahms may seem some distance apart, but they share a warmth of string sound. Brahms is one of those composers whom music history taught us early on to place in the conservative camp. On the other side stood Wagner and Liszt, new forms, the music of the future and the conviction that art must break boundaries. Yet one of the most radical composers of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg, heard Brahms differently. He went so far as to call him ‘Brahms the Progressive’.
The evening’s Brahms programme took us from the young composer’s piano quartet to his final symphony. Behind both works lay his encounter with Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf in 1853. Brahms was twenty when he played for them, and Robert Schumann’s response was almost prophetic. In his article ‘Neue Bahnen’, he presented the young man as the figure everyone had been waiting for. One of the leading composers of the day was telling the public that here was the man who would carry the great German tradition forward. It was a gift, but also an immense burden.
Hearing Brahms through Schoenberg’s ears
Brahms came to live with Beethoven looking over his shoulder. Various accounts survive of his remarks about the daunting prospect of writing a symphony after Beethoven. Whatever the precise wording, the problem was real in Brahms’s creative life. His First Symphony did not appear until he was in his forties.
But his relationship with history involved more than anxiety about tradition. He studied early music with an almost scholarly curiosity: Bach and Handel, counterpoint and older vocal music, Beethoven and Schubert. History was both something to live up to and a store of possibilities. What makes Brahms progressive lies in the way he uses the past.
Schoenberg heard this. A small idea in Brahms returns, but returns transformed. It may become shorter or longer, move from one voice to another, change its rhythm or take on a new function. Schoenberg called the principle ‘developing variation’. When he orchestrated the G minor Piano Quartet in 1937, more than seven decades after its composition, he gave us an opportunity to hear the work through his ears.
The orchestration is an analysis in sound. What is gathered into the piano’s texture in the original can acquire its own instrumental colour. A small gesture previously buried in the fabric suddenly emerges in a clarinet or bassoon. An inner voice catches the light. Luisi brought this out in a transparent interpretation, with tempi on the brisk side.
Schoenberg’s orchestration does not reveal ‘the true Brahms’ through some neutral X-ray machine. It brings particular connections to the fore, and Luisi makes his choices within that reading. The question of whether Schoenberg improved Brahms is therefore less interesting than the question of what he heard in this music from 1861. Schoenberg’s view of Brahms says: listen to the connections. This may be a more fruitful starting point for understanding musical modernity than simply asking who used the newest chords or the most sophisticated tone rows.
Brahms’s music often draws its life from the relationship between foreground and background. Some things are clearly audible; others are only sensed. Schoenberg’s orchestration can make the inner connections astonishingly clear, while reminding us that every performance involves choices. Luisi sought both transparency and a dense orchestral sound, with razor-sharp attacks and a carefully judged balance between the voices. Analysis and interpretation went hand in hand in his masterly command of the orchestra, which followed his directions down to the smallest detail.
The finale is marked ‘Rondo alla zingarese’. The designation belongs to the nineteenth-century idea of a Hungarian or so-called ‘Gypsy’ style. This is music of tremendous energy, virtuosity, rhythmic bite and an almost theatrical momentum. If we listen only to the surface sound, this is hardly where we are most likely to exclaim: ‘Ah, modernism!’ Yet that is precisely Schoenberg’s point. A progressive spirit can reside in the music’s inner organisation, even when its outward appearance is familiar.
Following the orchestra through this movement was like a wild ride on an untamed Arabian stallion. Virtuosic and, frankly, gloriously swaggering. The ever-spirited percussion section had its moment in the sun. Hats off.
When repetition takes us forward
With the Fourth Symphony, we leapt forward almost a quarter of a century. Brahms was no longer the young man Schumann had introduced to the world. Written during summer stays in Mürzzuschlag in Styria in 1884–85, it was to be his last symphony.
The first movement is, to use a worn metaphor, a journey. The term ‘sonata form’ can make even music lovers think of a textbook. So let us translate it into a story. First we meet the main characters in the exposition. The material is then subjected to change in the development. A homecoming follows in the recapitulation, and finally a conclusion, the coda. What matters is the expectation that something will return — and what its return does to us.
In this first movement, Brahms does something subtle. He does not ask for the exposition to be repeated. Instead, he brings back the opening so convincingly at the transition to the development that, for a moment, we may think we are starting again. What sounds like repetition turns out to be the entrance to further development. We think we are on familiar ground, but the floor is shifting beneath us. Here the connection with Schoenberg’s developing variation becomes clear. Our experience of form, too, can be transformed through what appears to be repetition. Sonata form becomes drama.
In Brahms, a small interval can acquire a new rhythm. A figure can migrate between voices. Something initially heard in the background can later move to the foreground. We recognise the family resemblance, but the identity is not fixed. This is how he creates such richness from such limited material. Schoenberg emphasised this musical economy: there is no need to keep inventing something new when the material already at hand can reveal new aspects of itself.
Think of a character in a novel. We do not need to meet a new person on every page. What interests us is that the same person encounters new situations and reveals something we did not know. We can listen to Brahms in the same way and ask: what has happened to this since I last heard it?
The poetry within the construction
When Brahms came to write the finale of what would be his last symphony, he turned to a musical idea rooted in the Baroque. His studies of early music became a practical resource, opening up possibilities in his own work. The finale is constructed as a passacaglia: a short, fixed foundation returns again and again while the music around it changes. Its theme is related to the chaconne bass in the final chorus of Bach’s Cantata BWV 150. Brahms reaches back into history and finds something that can take him forward.
Luisi moved directly from the third movement into the fourth, allowing the wind instruments to present the theme with monumental weight. Then the work began. The foundation returned, but the music did not stand still. Instrumentation and registers shifted. The rhythm changed character. The texture thickened and thinned. Some variations felt like continuations of the one before, so that we almost forgot we were listening to a set of variations.
Counting the theme and its variations tells us little about this listening experience. Under Luisi, the movement became one continuous process of transformation. The old principle — a recurring foundation — drove the music through constant change. The entire finale became a laboratory for the relationship between repetition and transformation.
After the energetic opening, something happened that almost changed the temperature of the hall. Luisi made room for it. The flute stepped forward, espressivo, and suddenly time felt different. On paper, a strict variation principle might suggest something mechanical: the same pattern, over and over again. Here we heard how far Brahms can travel in character without abandoning the underlying architecture. The poetry emerged from within the construction. Beautifully phrased by Ulla Miilmann.
The finale then moved towards an ending that withholds the triumph a symphonic finale so often promises. No redemptive turn to the major, no grand, reconciling apotheosis. E minor holds its ground, and the music ends with a stern inevitability. This, too, is why the Fourth Symphony can feel so modern, even though its finale is built on an old form.
An embrace between generations
It has been far too long since I last heard the Danish National Symphony Orchestra live. I had almost forgotten how well it plays. Here and there, the eye catches new, young musicians, and what exuberance they bring — what youthful faith that music can help us make a better world. A thought Kim Bohr also emphasised in his introduction when he spoke of Blomstedt’s vision.
The new meets the old; the young meet their elders. Quite literally, when the concert ends and orchestra leader Christina Åstrand rises to embrace her young Norwegian colleague Ludvig Gudim, who now shares the front desk with her as first concertmaster.
It does not get any better. Thank you.
Archive photograph: Kim Matthäi Leland / DR.