Brahms: Big & Bold

What’s Interesting About This Concert

• Paul Creston's music has been called brash, vital, spontaneous, intense, and flambouyant. The Fantasy, op 42, written in 1947, is all of these. Long, lush, motivically generated melodies combine with driving rhythmic sections and lush harmony in this work.

• Johannes Brahms is said to have never missed a performance of Die Fledermaus. Jules Massenet observed, “Brahms is the spirit of Vienna, but Strauss is the perfume.”

• Brahms was 43 years old when his first symphony premiered in Karlsruhe in 1876. Its composition took at least fourteen years, though some scholars believe Brahms, at the urging of Robert Schumann, began his work as early as 1855. Why did it take so long? Mostly because of the esteem with which Brahms (and so many other composers of the period) held the symphonies of Beethoven. “I shall never write a symphony” Brahms once told a friend, “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.”