Brahms: Symphony No 3, Serenade No 2 – Underpowered start to joyful finale

Do you like the opening of Brahms’s Third Symphony to be played with gutsy thrust and blaze and bite? If so, there’s a fair chance that you may find this new account by Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra – completing the Brahms symphony cycle they began back in 2009 – a little underpowered. Fischer seems to want the music to get its momentum more from pulsating inner parts than from the expressive projection of the main melodic line.

Everything is beautifully contoured, with moments of chamber music-like give and take. Yet, even though the temperature does rise later in the movement, the overall effect is still on the light side. In Fischer’s hands the central movements persuasively mix the genial and the plaintive with delicate expressiveness. The finale, fleet and tense, is hotter than the first movement. The coupling, the Serenade in A, Op. 16, the composer’s second purely orchestral work, was completed nearly a quarter of a century before the symphony.

It’s been described as neo-classical. Both Fischer’s highly observant reserve and his interest in the texture and nap of Brahms’s often relaxed writing pay dividends here. And the finale is suitably joyful.