Orchestra: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor: Bernstein, Leonard

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Composer: Brahms, Johannes

Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80

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Venue: Grosser Musikvereinssaal, Vienna

Date of Concert: 1982

Playing Time: 00:12:22

Television Director: Burton, Humphrey

Catalogue Number: A05500672

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Between 1981 and 1984, Leonard Bernstein recorded nearly all of Brahms's orchestral works with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to honor the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth in 1833. Today, the cycle is considered as a landmark in the interpretation of Brahms's music. For Bernstein, Brahms was "a true Romantic, containing his passions in classical garb," but also a "North-German classicist swept away to Vienna, and fired by Danubian, Carpathian and gypsy passions." Bearing this dualism in mind, Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic have underscored both the classicism and romanticism, the dramatic intensity and the sober restraint of Brahms's music. The venue was Vienna's Musikvereinssaal, where two of Brahms's symphonies were premiered and where Brahms himself conducted. For the concertos, Bernstein enlisted the services of some of the finest Brahms interpreters of the time: the violinist Gidon Kremer, the cellist Misha Maisky and the pianist Krystian Zimerman.