Programme Guide

Claudio Abbado’s outstanding performances of Brahms played a major role in the Italian’s selection as successor to Herbert von Karajan. So it was no surprise that the composer was a fixture in Abbado’s repertoire during his tenure with the Philharmoniker. As part of a tour of Japan together in 1992, the orchestra and chief conductor held veritable Brahms festivals.

In addition to Brahms’s four symphonies, other orchestral works, the two piano concertos and the violin concerto were also performed at Suntory Hall, with Viktoria Mullova as the soloist. With her seemingly effortless technique and the intense seriousness of her interpretations, she won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki in 1980 – the beginning of her international career.

Johannes Brahms’s Second Symphony was premiered in December 1877, just 13 months after the First. While his symphonic debut had been the result of a long and painstaking process, the composer found the subsequent Second Symphony surprisingly easy to write. The symphony, in which idyllic, melancholy and dramatic passages culminate in a triumphant finale, cemented the composer’s reputation as one of the greatest symphonists since Beethoven. The influential music critic Eduard Hanslick wrote of the Violin Concerto, which was premiered a year after the Second Symphony, that “it may well be the most significant violin concerto to appear since Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s”. The critic’s doubts about the piece’s success with the public have long since been dispelled: today, the Violin Concerto is not only considered one of the most profound works of this genre, but also one of the most popular.