One of my favorite quotes about Brahms’ fourth symphony comes from Ravel. I can’t remember it exactly, but a friend of Ravel’s asks if he is going to go to a performance, and Ravel says something like ‘why would I go listen to that silly waltz?’, his friend says Ravel must be confused, there is no waltz in the fourth symphony. Then Ravel says ‘sure there is’ and starts to sing to melody to the first movement in 3/4 DAAA-da, DAAA-da, DAAA-da etc. etc. Whenever I hear the fourth now, I almost always think of how Ravel must have sung this (probably quite a bit like a couple of his ‘Valses nobles et sentimantales’).

Tonight I ripped the Bernard Haitink box set of the symphonies along with a number of other orchestral works (including both serenades!). The box is part of a set of boxes covering most of the romantic and some classical symphonic repertoire that Phillips put out featuring Haitink and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Most were done in the ‘70s, and they pulled together complete sets of Brahms, Schumann, Mahler, Beethoven and others. Many of these recordings now show up as budget discs, and as a result they are often overlooked, but they are wonderful performances. Haitink is such a great musician and conductor, and paired with one of the best orchestras in the world in a wonderful concert hall, it is hard to go wrong. The boxes are hard to find now (and I’m still searching for the Mahler and Bruckner sets), but many of these sets can be pieced together as single discs and double-disc sets. Not a bad way to build up a good overview of symphonic literature!