Fabio Luisi conducts Brahms and Nielsen

How do you reconcile with a friend you’ve offended? If you’re Johannes Brahms, you dedicate your last great orchestral work to him, naturally...

When Brahms’s friend of several decades, the violinist Joseph Joachim, split up with his wife Amalie (a renowned contralto), Brahms sided with Amalie and found himself abruptly estranged from Joseph. As a gesture of good will, he decided to dedicate the 1887 Double Concerto for Violin and Cello to his longtime friend and collaborator—a gesture which, happily, had its intended effect. If the work is a musical portrait of friendship, it’s fitting that, in this lovely 2019 recording, the solo roles go to a pair of sisters: Soo-Jin Hong, a violinist with exquisite phrasing, and Soo-Kyung Hong, whose cello rings out with warm and elegant tone.

In the second part of the program, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra explores its national roots with a perfect rendition—under the exacting baton of Fabio Luisi—of the Sinfonia Espansiva by Danish composer Carl Nielsen, who described it as “a hymn to work and the ordinary man.” The piece fluctuates between different tonalities and extreme moods, especially in its third movement: melodious, bucolic, energetic, bordering on epic. The fourth movement, incidentally, may remind some Brahms fans of a certain grandiose moment from his First Symphony...