Brahms: Serenades

Product Description Following the `Gramophone Record of the Year' award-winning set of the Brahms Symphonies, Riccardo Chailly turns his "rare talent for transforming music ripe for rediscovery" to Brahms's Serenades. This exquisite recording renews these unjustly neglected works and marks their first Decca recording since 1968. Part of a wider Brahms project by Chailly and his Leipzig orchestra, these works emerge not just as precursors of the symphonies but powerful and individual works in their own right. Review For an orchestra as steeped in the Austro-German tradition as the Gewandhaus is, playing Brahms has always been part of its raison d être. But Chailly brings a different perspective: as with Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mahler, his approach is both mindful of the performing traditions and critical of them in the best, most constructive way. His Brahms is neither massive nor self-consciously sculpted, but still totally coherent --The Guardian