These are very early pieces from a period when young Johannes was writing a steady stream of gigues, menuets, etc. etc. without the pressure to be Beethoven that marks his contemporaneous "public" works.  These were essentially model compositions and as far as I know how some of them escaped the inevitable fire remains a mystery.

I dont know about m ost of you but I do find Abbado rather boring and not very inspiring in this reading of his. Perhaps with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, this may have a better result.

NB I know some of you may have heard myself beong mentioned, albeit from TOP, but the cd in question is very worthwhile getting to know what brass bands are playing as far as contemporary music is concerned.

 The short excerpts of the Cuarteto Casals disc on RR sounded fine to me too SH. On the other hand Brahms has been dead 110 years or so. Of course this doesn't mean his music should be played as though following the grumpy, bearded old fellow to his grave, but does his music lend itself to being played as if written in 1980 and not 1880?

  I wonder, If you have this disc to hand, could you be so kind as to give me details of the cover painting? Thank you very much.

I must admit I find Brahms almost uniquely suitable among the Great Classics in exactly this way. The way he put his music together seems to allow particularly well for a variety of approaches to phrasing, tempo and the like, and to my ear it works very well indeed with an extremely analytical approach - it can be performed very objectively without losing any of its emotional temperature.

I reckon.

(Schumann and Schubert are two others though. Hear Christine Schäfer's Winterreise if you get the chance. Very bleakly modernist.)

I don't pretend it to be particularly profound or even original but for me Brahms is very close to the post-impressionists in that certain specific technical aspects are crucial in opening up directions for future exploration (whose results he couldn't possibly have imagined and might for all I know or care well have abhorred). In particular that elemental side of things, sometimes building entire pieces out of a single interval - Schoenberg pointed at that as an influence of course. Hard not to relate that to things like Cézanne & Van Gogh's multiple perspectives, or the pointillists, or...

The thing is, that's often explicit in his instructions for performance, in particular those tiny little slurs. The clarinet trio and the F minor clarinet sonata (guess what instrument I play  ) teem with them and they're an important aspect of making that underlying construction graspable for the listener. They're also extremely enjoyable to perform even on a purely physical level. 

 Oliver- it is rather very impertinent of me to cross swords with you on anything concerning musical theory however   does the fact that Brahms was the first romantic composer to take a deep interest in early music, a composer who would often base the structure of his compositions on forms taken from Bach, could "build entire pieces out of a single interval" and whose music has "multiple perspectives" that lend themselves well to an "analytical approach" allow a green light to play his music if it were a dry exercise in  musical possibilities? As I said earlier, and you state yourself, to construct a performance with a strict regard for form might not preclude giving an emotionally involving- if far from romantic- performance but I thought Tiberghien's piano playing sounded as if he was giving a scientific analysis of some dots on ten lines.
  Although I have heard few perfomances of Schoenberg's orchestrations of  Brahms' chamber music do they not give a "Romantic" twist to the music? I don't know the dates of composition but they sound rather more in the style  of Gurrelieder than that of the 12-tone composer.Would you suggest that an orchestration of Brahms might be possible by a composer viewing the music from "the other side of the tonal fence" that would give a legitimate view of the chamber music? (If the Brahms orchestration is from 1920 I guess that rather spoils the question.) . If Brahms had lived (and worked) to 90 would he have shown an interest in using the forms of atonal music do you think? How far is a rendition of a composer's music that the composer "would abhorre" a rendition of that composer's music? or is  everything open in a post-modern (or is it a post-post-modern )world?
  Schumann had his two personalities but can either be approached "objectively". Schumann objective?
   As I said bit of a cheek for me to question you opinion on such matters, it's just your comments do give a very different view of the music of Brahms (and  Schumann) to the one that I have held for a life-time. I would like to hear a Tchaikovsky "Pathetique" played in a very cold, hard, detatched manner but then I'm not keen on Tchaikovsky.
  SH - again many thanks.

 There you are! I said I was being impertinent.

Reading all this, I don't think Ollie's comments are in any way incompatible with Ted's view of Brahms. These structural principles and connections are simply there, and it's utterly clear that Brahms intended them. Schoenberg merely picked up on one perspective (the consistency of the relationship between interval and form - but then he had his head in that particular sandpit most of the time). What to me is particularly interesting is what Ollie writes above about slurrings and other types of articulation with which Brahms suggests ways in which structural connections might be heard through the agency of the performer.

It reminded me, Ted, that we had a rather good discussion of Brahms last year, before you joined I think. Here's a relevant page or two...

http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=1010.30