The face also shows his determination and strength – he may not have been Moses but he stands as a rock in the history of classical music when its glorious past and vulnerable future was in danger of slipping from the forefront of European culture. He was that strange mix, a traditionalist progressive.

He is not often heard in cheerful high-spirits and can seldom be accused of over-optimism but, in a troubled but also highly successful life, there is a particularly joyful period or so a batch of his compositions written around that time show. I am, regular readers will not be surprized by this, talking about the year 1878 (my current resting spot through the history of music) when, having written the exquisitely romantic 2nd Symphony, he went on to write his passionate Violin Sonata No. 1(1879) and, my current obsession, that most symphonic of violin concertos, his Violin Concerto in D (ignoring Max Reger’s seldom heard piece) where his customary melancholy is mixed with the spirit of the great outdoors, of the joyful world of the Viennese waltz and the boisterousness of a night in a Hungarian drinking bar. It is also, as so often with Brahms, a forward looking and challenging work that pays more than passing tribute to his beloved past masters especially, here, Mozart and Beethoven. As with his greatest compositions, the concerto creates its own sound world and, if I had to choose which musical world I would most like to visit, currently it is the lyrical one inhabited by Brahms’ sunniest moods.

As with the Second Symphony (1877),  the Violin Concerto was written at his summer “holiday” retreat at Pörtschach am Wörthersee in Southern Austria, still home to a Brahms Festival and a favourite resort for Gustav Mahler too. It appears that Brahms was happy there. It is in the music, for sure, but I wonder if there is any significance in the fact that while writing the concerto there, he also grew his beard. It was his first beard and he would never shave it off.

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Yesterday was St. Valentine’s Day and I was in the mood for Brahms. The piece on my 1878 ‘turntable,’ my journey through the history of classical music,  is his first violin sonata, known as The Raindrop after one of his songs used as the basis for the whole sonata’s structure. You don’t really need to know that the song is one of love lost and tears in the rain but it’s worthwhile, one day, for you to listen to the song and see how cleverly he uses fragments of it to build the framework. Brahms would be cross with us if we tried to get too literal about music’s “meaning” – he argued with Wagner and Liszt in the thorny 19th Century debate about whether music needed a tangible explanation and he believed and defended music as “absolute” and essentially abstract in its sublimity. Let’s not go into that here though while listening to Brahms at his most romantic and where there really is no need for words. If Brahms can talk without words then so too can the musicians here, Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim (their CD recording is a must-have). Even though no words describe what the music is saying here, it’s not out of place to hear it the day after Valentines. Here’s the slow movement:

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It was raining here in Lewes, UK, this morning and the sky was angry and dark. Great I thought, I can stay in and do indoor things, weekend, lazy, self-indulgent things. My gym schedule rules that I shouldn’t do any exercise this weekend and the weather is telling me to do what I wanted to do anyway. I have plans for a musical weekend in the company of Johannes Brahms and Rufus Wainwright.

Brahms Symphony No. 1 is my current study piece as it is the jewel in the crown of the year 1876 on my long journey through the history of music and, thanks to a friend, I have now got the recording made by james Levine with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. I loved this on LP but haven’t heard it for twenty years until now as it is unavailable in the UK. I’m loving it just as I did then but a little bit more maybe coming to it in chronological order.

I’m amazed i hadn’t come across Rufus Wainwright’s double album Want before. I know some of his songs and admire him as a songwriter so getting to know Want is going to be the other side of my indulgent weekend. Annoyingly though, the sun has just come out.

More of Brahms’ First to come but, for now,  here’s Rufus Wainwright:

Meanwhile, I’m getting into gear for the imminent publication (in October)  of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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The Times ran an article yesterday that might have seemed dull to some but was pure delight to a classical music geek like me. They asked nine different writers to name their favourite numbered symphony – each writer having just one number.  Nine, of course, is the magic symphonic numeral after Beethoven’s monumental canon of symphonies. Schubert wrote nine too – or eight and a half if you feel his Unfinished sounds, well, unfinished. Mahler, neurotic in most things was positively frenzied over the thought that he would die, like Beethoven, after finishing his 9th so he called his real 9th, The Song Of The Earth, a song cycle and then wrote what we call his 9th and, well naturally, he died before finishing his 10th – just like Ludwig Van.

Well, I can’t resist a musical game so I had a go myself and toughened up the rules by saying that you can only have a composer once in your list of nine symphonies. Inevitably things had to go mostly because the greatest symphony composers wrote a lot more than one great symphony and, also, Haydn and Mozart  didn’t get going until they got to double figures but hey, it is only a game.

So here it is, my list of nine symphonies I would never want to live without allowing for the fact that there are a whole lot more out there  as well:

1)  Walton – Symphony No. 1 in B flat minor, Op 11

2)   Elgar – Symphony No. 2 in E flat, Op 63

3)   Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 in E flat Op 55 (Eroica)

4)   Brahms –  Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op 98

5)   Sibelius – Symphony No. 5 in E flat, Op 82

6)   Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op 74 (Pathetique)

7)  Shostakovich – Symphony No. 7 in C, Op 60 (Leningrad)

8)   Schubert – Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D.759 (Unfinished)

9)   Mahler – Symphony No. 9 in D minor

Now it’s your turn – send me your list and we can compare, er, notes.

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When, if, people think of the composer Brahms, they remember the man with the big bushy beard. He looks jovial enough here but maybe those eyes are a mismatch for Santa Claus – they are much too searching and sad. It is as if he is actually hiding behind his beard as Jan Swafford observes in his definitive book on the composer (Johannes Brahms, A Biography. Vintage ISBN: 0-679-74582-3). It is also true that you can see here the man who enjoyed his tankard(s) of good German beer with his friends.

Brahms is capable in his music of a similar mix of joy and sorrow.

I have been playing my way through the history of Classical music for some years now, as I have mentioned on these pages before, and I have been stuck in 1873 throughout the Summer alighting on the final work on my list just as I have, it seems, entered a new phase in my life.

New phases are a mix of the good and the bad, the exciting and the disturbing, the joyful and the sad and, yes, not just the new but the old too. Brahms is just the man to see me through this time.

My progress has taken me through music from the early church composers who first added ornamental lines to Gregorian chants, musicians call it counterpoint, to the great Renaissance composers who brought the style to a kind of perfection and then to the genius of J.S. Bach who took their ideas of independent melodic lines intermingling precisely, emotionally and beautifully onto an unimagined level of inspiration – finding novelty in what was by then a time-worn tradition. It was an exciting experience coming to Bach and all these composers in the strict order of time.

Bach may have become unfashionable in smart circles in the late 18th. Century but his music survived as an inspiration for the great composers who followed in the so-called Classical Period of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven who, not always far from the surface, show their formal indebtedness to Bach and to everything that he passed on from his predecessors right back to those early writers of counterpoint.

It is there too after Beethoven’s death, hidden from view maybe, in the intricate piano music of Chopin and, more obviously in the organ and choral music of that great Bach “revivalist” Mendelssohn. The 19th. Century’s struggle to come up with something new after Beethoven gave us the fallible glories of Berlioz and Wagner but came to its natural conclusion with the final coming of age of Johannes Brahms.

Brahms, like me but with much more profundity, studied, to the point of nerdiness, the history of music even those aspects of it that were left dumped in libraries’ forgotten basements during an era when the new was the only thing worthy of attention.

Oddly, it seems to me, it was the man who spent such a long time in his lengthy development as a composer studying the past, who came to be seen as also the beginning of a new age in music after we grew to see Wagner as a wonderful but distracting byway in the long development of classical music with its mix of form and feeling.

It is Brahms who leads us to Mahler and beyond into the toughly exciting music of the 20th. Century and it was to Brahms that I turn in times when the old makes way for the new.

It was highly appropriate then that the incidental music to my last few weeks has been Brahms’ Variations On A Theme By Haydn – a piece that marked the beginning of the greatest period of his life as a composer with its new mastery of the orchestra, complexity of form and subtlety in the art of variation writing and where he was to find a happy marriage of the old with the new. It is, amongst other things,  his testament of thanks to the many composers who built the road that brought him finally to join their ranks on the top level of European musical art.

I have never been good at simply celebrating the good or just mourning the bad – we are a mixture of moods even in the best of times so what better way to celebrate this new time in my life than with the multi-coloured variations and especially the towering Passacaglia final movement of the Brahms’ Haydn Variations (which, incidentally, historians have decided is not by Haydn at all) where an unvaried set of notes in the bass supports what is at times an almost hysterical mix of mood, colour and rhythm above it.  The Passacaglia, of course, being used in a thrillingly modern way but also as homage to the last great composer to write one, Johan Sebastian Bach. If you keep your concentration going with the bass-line, Brahms carries you away to possibilities beyond your imagination in a piece that demonstrates that we can only really reach new heights once we are grounded in understanding who we really are.

I am sometimes tempted to give up my progress through music in such a precise chronological order but then at moments like this, you can, I think, just for a moment, get a feel for those great moments in music when the future grows out of the past right in front of your ears.

Here is that passacaglia played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult  but you really need to hear the whole thing:

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Friday afternoon in Lewes

The Aronowitz Ensemble

Adam is a fox in case you didn’t know, because he is one of the founder members of the rock band Foxes! who are about to embark on a national tour with the band Stornoway. This classical music concert was a welcome change, or so he said, from his own world of guitars, drums and keyboards before he hits the road for a few weeks with his own band next weekend. If you want to see them, says the wolf  plugging shamelessly, look up their dates on their website. http://www.foxesfoxesfoxes.co.uk

Foxes! are fun but they are also serious musicians and the same can be said for their classical contemporaries in the Aronowitz Ensemble, a youthful and informal group themselves who have already gathered an international reputation and have had consecutive successes at The Proms in recent years. They are really a string sextet with piano and, that night, they were playing music by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and the less well known French composer Ernest Chausson (1855-1899) and we were honoured by their visit to Lewes.

It was perfect music if you wanted to spend an early Autumn evening listening to romantic (with both a capital and a lower case “R”)  but intelligently constructed music played in an intimate environment by seven virtuoso musicians  with fire in their bellies. If you wish you had been with us on Friday night, well, tough, but you can hear the Aronowitz Ensemble playing the same programme at London’s Wigmore Hall on the 8th. November.

The Chausson, Concerto for Piano, Violin and String Quartet op 21 had the ideal mix, from my point of view anyway, of passion, irony, wit and beauty for beauty’s sake. Ideal music for an Autumn night after a  tumultuous, flu-strained week and played in an excitingly clean and vigorous manner by the Aronowitzes.

We would know more of Chausson’s music, which is an elegant mix of late Nineteenth Century Romanticism with hints of the spikier sounds of 20th. Century Neo-classicism,  if he hadn’t lost control of his bicycle at the age of 44 and crashed fatally into a brick wall in 1899. Maybe his end was, in his own way, an early version of a rock ‘n roll accident – a bit like Buddy Holly. Here is a taste of his piece:

The second half of the concert was made up of Brahms’ String Sextet No. 2 which in many ways also pursues a rock music agenda with its emphasis on passion, erotic and unrequited love and the excitement of the bawdy establishments to which he was no stranger. This piece is his farewell to any hope of romantic or married happiness. It is a musical farewell to his former fiance, the voluptuous singer, Agathe von Siebold and a statement of love for his lifelong, idealised and probably platonic friend Clara Schumann. From this time onwards, he had decided to live alone as an artist and this he kept secret, he would only find sexual fulfillment in the company of prostitutes. Brahms was serious-minded but essentially a Rolling Stone at heart. The Aronowitz Ensemble didn’t shy away from this agenda even when they were looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Adam from Foxes! liked it too. I wonder if it could have an influence on any of the new songs. Here is the opening of the Brahms and if you like it, get yourselves a ticket for the Wigmore Hall and experience some of the excitement of these vibrant young musicians. maybe you could catch the Foxes! tour as well.

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