REWIND
Great artists talk about their past recordings
This month: THOMAS DAUSGAARD Conductor
MY FINEST MOMENT
R Strauss An Alpine Symphony
Seattle Symphony Orchestra/
Thomas Dausgaard
Seattle Symphony Media SSM1023 (2019)
This recording was released for the opening of the 2019/20 season, my first with the Seattle Symphony as music director. We were discussing which of the many live recordings we should use, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was it.
There is one glorious moment towards the end; Strauss asks the orchestra to perform in ‘so ecstasy’.
A er a long passage for the winds, the violins join in with a slow melody, making a huge jump up in a very cantabile fashion. When I heard that on the recording I just cried – I have never cried over a recording I have done – and it happened every time I came to this point during the edit.
I felt the whole performance was something very special, and I remember in the rehearsals that there was definitely something brewing in the orchestra; there was some gloriousness in the sound and in the feeling. It made me spontaneously go to Dmitriy Lipay, our fantastic recording producer, and say ‘please, make sure you record it well.’ We hadn’t
played much Strauss at this point, but I felt they had a natural a nity with it. They owned that language in some wonderful way and gave me so much. There was a kind of generosity in that moment, which I cherish very much.
MY FONDEST MEMORY
Brahms Symphony No. 4
Swedish Chamber Orchestra/
Thomas Dausgaard
BIS BIS-2383 (2020)
As I took on the Seattle Symphony, I finished my time with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra – a period of 22 years, during which recording had been so important.
Our mission had been to explore repertoire that wasn’t o en assigned to a chamber orchestra, to test the limits. We recorded works by Beethoven, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Dvo ák, even Wagner. There are many more chamber orchestras doing it now, but when we started out it was not normal. We felt like we were breaking new ground, and it was in that pioneer spirit that we came to the end with Brahms Symphony No. 4.
It was sort of filled with a sense of fulfilment and a gratefulness for our time together. The essence of it, for me, was the trust we had built up over all these years, the trust to feel each other and communicate. I feel we reached each other in a deeper way; it wasn’t just conductor and orchestra, we were music makers. What’s more fitting than this last big symphonic work of Brahms?
I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT… Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1
Nikolaj Koppel (piano); Danish National Symphony Orchestra/thomas Dausgaard EMI Classics 556 9422 (1999)
I did a recording of Brahms’s First
Piano Concerto very early in my career, with a pianist I really love, and a good friend, Nikolaj Koppel. We shared a deep love for this concerto and I was very proud to record it with a Danish pianist – it is no mean achievement: we are a small country, so I was very happy about that. We did have a very di erent approach, however, and though I loved so many aspects of the collaboration, when I listen now I can hear that we come from two di erent worlds.
When I first heard the opening of that concerto live, I simply could not get over the first minute or so and I became addicted. It was really a huge love of my youth and meant so much to me.
Of course, for Brahms it was his reaction to the suicide attempt by Schumann, so it is music – unusually for Brahms – of incredible spontaneity. It has a volcanic power from inside which he later tamed, I think. It’s like an almost unfiltered response to this suicide attempt, and that arouses some feelings in me. I want to feel that in the pianist, too. We had much discussion about it at the time, but we just came from very di erent ideals.
Thomas Dausgaard’s recording of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is out on
BIS Records in September