Brahms' Third

Otto Tausk
Conductor

Internationally recognised for his dynamic musicianship and insightful interpretations, Dutch conductor Otto Tausk has worked with leading orchestras and opera houses worldwide, conducting a diverse repertoire ranging from core symphonic works to contemporary compositions.

Tausk is Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor to the VSO School of Music, where he has collaborated with leading soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Itzhak Perlman, Daniil Trifonov, Gidon Kremer, James Ehnes, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Hilary Hahn, Khatia Buniatishvili, and Hélène Grimaud.

Recent and upcoming engagements include debuts with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Belgian National Orchestra at the Klara Festival, and NDR Philharmonie Hannover at the Schleswig- Holstein Musik Festival, along with returns to the Residentie Orkest, Philharmonie Südwestfalen, West Australian Symphony Orchestra, OSPA Oviedo, Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and Staatskapelle Weimar.

Tausk has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Stuttgart Philharmoniker, and orchestras across the UK including BBC Scottish Symphony and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with whom he performed Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenlebe at the 2018 BBC Proms.

In summer 2024, Tausk continued his collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducting several soldout performances at the Hollywood Bowl featuring the music of Tchaikovsky. His 2023/24 season included a highly successful tour of Thomas Adès’ opera Powder Her Face with the Reisopera and the world premiere of Het Pand der Goden by Surinamese composer Johannes Helstone with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which was broadcast on television in Paramaribo.

From 2012 to 2018, Tausk was Music Director of the Theater und Orchester Sankt Gallen, where he led numerous operas, including the world premiere of Annas Maske by Swiss composer David Hefti, the Swiss premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, and productions of Don Giovanni, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Eugene Onegin, West Side Story, Lohengrin, and Ariadne auf Naxos. Other operatic engagements include the world premiere of Caruso in Cuba by Micha Hamel at Dutch National Opera and the 2022 world premiere of Michel van der Aa’s Upload in Amsterdam, followed by performances in Cologne, Bregenz, and New York.

In 2025, Tausk received his first Spellemann nomination for his role as conductor on Piano Concertos for the Left Hand, released by Backlash Music. The album features pianist Mathias Halvorsen and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra performing Ravel’s and Korngold’s Lefthand Concertos. Tausk has also recorded with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Luc Brewaeys and Peter and the Wolf), Tonhalle-Orchester St. Gallen (Korngold and Diepenbrock), BBC Scottish Symphony (Mendelssohn), Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (Gavin Bryars), and Danish National Symphony Orchestra (Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen).

His 2011 recording of Hans Pfitzner’s Orchesterlieder for the cpo label received international acclaim, earning Classica France’s Choc du Mois. His Prokofiev recording with Rosanne Philippens was named BBC Music Magazine Concerto Disc of the Month (2018).

Born in Utrecht, Tausk initially studied violin with Viktor Liberman and Istvan Parkanyi before pursuing conducting with Kenneth Montgomery, Jurjen Hempel, and Jonas Aleksa in Vilnius, Lithuania. From 2004 to 2007, he served as Assistant Conductor to Valery Gergiev at the Rotterdam Philharmonic. For his contributions to the arts in the Netherlands, particularly his leadership at Holland Symfonia (2007 to 2012), Tausk was awarded the prestigious De Olifant prize by the City of Haarlem.

Joseph Haydn
(1732–1809)

Die Schöpfung (The Creation): Overture

There is a famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the 1500s, Michelangelo crafted his history-making work The Creation of Adam in which a wise old man floats in the sky, reaching his hand out to a human perched on the edge of a cliff. Their fingertips almost touch to spark the birth of it all – the creation of man or, according to some art historians who observe the brain-like shape that envelops the figure of God, the creation of knowledge.

This scene of biblical scale and significance has appeared in art and literature for centuries, and Haydn crafted his own depiction in 1797 with his music about this moment and everything that surrounds it: Die Schöpfung (The Creation). The text draws from the Bible and Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 1667 biblical poem. Haydn was also influenced by the Baroque composer Handel’s own biblical masterworks, Messiah (1741) and Israel in Egypt (1738). Like The Creation, these were oratorios, which is a bit like a sacred opera without staging. But here, you’re listening to the Overture, which is part of his oratorio without singing.

In the beginning, it is sparsely orchestrated with long and loud tones from imposing brass and mysterious strings. This introductory section to Haydn’s work is called Representation of Chaos, and it’s a prequel to the creation of all things to come. The instruments first appear to exist in a vacuum; silence is just as important as sound in the depiction of nothing before everything. Soon, textures become layered, loud becomes soft, and the winds give us bright little hints of the beautiful world that will literally unfold over the course of the oratorio. But for now, it’s sporadic and spontaneous. Don’t try too hard to grasp Haydn’s chaotic beat, just sit back in awe and observe his majestic musical creation.

© Stephanie Eslake, 2026

First public performance:
19 March 1799, Vienna. Joseph Haydn, conductor

First WASO performance of the complete oratorio:
April 1960. Frank Callaway, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; two horns, two trumpets and two trombones; timpani, harpsichord and strings.

Jean Sibelius
(1865–1957)

The Swan of Tuonela

We rightly think of Sibelius as a composer who distilled a national musical language from Finnish legend and the austere beauty of Finland’s landscape. As a culture-hero, however, Sibelius was made, not born. The Finnish language possesses a large and ancient literature of poetic cycles dedicated to mythic heroes. The greatest of these was the Kalevala. As part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, Sibelius hadn’t given much thought to the traditional mythology of the Finns until his engagement to Aino Järnefelt, whose family was very pro-Finnish; Järnefelt’s enthusiasm inspired him to start reading its literature.

The results became quickly apparent in early works of Sibelius’ maturity: the 1890s saw the composition of works like the Kullervo Symphony, En saga, the Karelia Suite and the Four Legends from the Kalevala (also known as the Lemminkäinen Suite). This depicts four incidents in the story of the mythical hero Lemminkäinen, from the Kalevala.

Having seduced all but one of the Island maidens in the first movement, Lemminkäinen is sent on a quest: to kill the swan that floats, singing mournfully, on the river that surrounds Tuonela, the island of the dead. (In the third and fourth movements, Lemminkäinen is mortally wounded and dismembered before he can kill the swan, but is brought back to life by his mother, and returns home.)

The Swan of Tuonela does not seek to enact any specific incident but depicts the bird in one of the most famous solos for cor anglais ever written. The instrument’s plangency against a halo of divided strings contains unspeakable grief, which is answered in the latter parts of the movement by a sombre but purposeful melody from the orchestra.

Abridged from an annotation by Gordon Kerry © 2011

First Performance of Four Legends From Kalevala:
April 1896, Helsinki. Composer conducting.

First WASO Performance of The Swan of Tuonela:
1958. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor.

Most Recent WASO Performance of The Swan of Tuonela:
8-9 May 2015. Baldur Brönnimann, conductor.

Instrumentation:
solo cor anglais, one oboe, one clarinet and two bassoons; four horns, three trombones; timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

Johannes Brahms
(1833–1897)

Symphony No.3 in F, Op.90

Allegro con brio
Andante
Poco allegretto
Allegro

While the connection between Beethoven and Brahms has long been remarked, the influence of Goethe on Brahms has never been acknowledged fully. Like Brahms, Goethe was at heart a Classicist whose artistic vision was nevertheless broad enough to embrace, and indeed to be embraced by, the Romantic spirit of his age.

Perhaps because their art strived to reconcile these two conflicting impulses of passion and order, and perhaps because of the magnitude of the messages which they sought to convey, both Goethe and Brahms struggled for decades over their greatest masterpieces. In Brahms’ case, the breakthrough First Symphony took 15 years of painstaking effort. For Goethe, Faust emerged only after 60 years of intermittent rejection and revision. So perhaps it should be no surprise that when Brahms sought to convey his most personal thoughts through music, he turned to Goethe for his texts.

So too the middle movements of the Third Symphony emerged (according to Max Kalbeck) from incidental music which Brahms had sketched (but apparently never used) for a production of Goethe’s Faust. While no obvious traces of this appear in the Third Symphony, the dramatic power and universalist vision embodied within it suggest that no ordinary motivations were behind its composition.

Brahms began formal work on the Third Symphony during 1882 and completed it in Wiesbaden in 1883, when he was 50 years old. He had moved to Wiesbaden primarily to be near the contralto Hermine Spies, and it seems that she was the latest in a longish line of female idols whom Brahms wished to marry but didn’t dare ask.

Brahms’ unrequited love for Hermine was exacerbated by other personal crises at this time – not least the recent death of his revered teacher Eduard Marxsen and a temporary estrangement from Joseph Joachim. Small wonder then that the sunny disposition of the Second Symphony gave way now to more mixed emotions.

The Third Symphony's first performance was given by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter in December 1883 and was well received on first hearing. It has never really fallen out of favour, owing to its mastery of construction, its persuasive blend of lyricism and drama, and its exceptional orchestration. Apparently during the first rehearsals Brahms made many minor adjustments to the instrumental arrangements, subtly altering the orchestral colouring. And the resulting work, with its extraordinary clarity of instrumental effects and chamber music textures, demonstrates that Brahms was a much-underrated orchestrator.

He was even better at providing spectacular openings for his symphonies, and the Third is no exception. It begins with three dramatic chords which immediately give way to the passionate main theme in the strings. As in so much of Brahms’ greatest music, the first 30 seconds have penetrated directly into the heart of the musical matter, and the sound-world of the entire symphony has largely been established. After the graceful secondary theme appears in the clarinet, the development is followed by the return of the opening motif in the horns, leading to an unusually diverse recapitulation and a coda which brings a more tranquil restatement of the opening material.

The slow movement contains one of Brahms’ most famous melodies which is introduced by the clarinet and then imitated by the violas and other sections of the orchestra. It is music which is so evocative that it lends itself to a variety of conflicting interpretations – it is chorale-like but also pastoral, its grace is Mozartian but its reflectiveness is typically Brahmsian, it is almost naive in sentiment but extraordinarily sophisticated in execution, and its musical material is basically diatonic but with interjections of wrong-key ‘foreign’ chords.

The third movement serves as a kind of melancholy minuet and trio. The minuet opens in the cellos, and, after a brief trio section, it returns with the horn leading the way.

As in his other symphonies, Brahms throws the weight back on in the finale. It begins sotto voce and with a sense of suppressed agitation but soon boils over, the blaring brass and woodwind working up to a climax during the development. In the recapitulation the tempo slows and at last, in pianissimo whispers in the strings, the very first theme of the symphony returns, and consolation takes over from conflict as this most unified and beautifully proportioned of symphonies ushers in its sublime conclusion. Had he lived to hear it, Goethe may well have been impressed.

Adapted from a note by Martin Buzacott
Symphony Australia © 1997

First Performance:
2 December 1883, Vienna. Hans Richter conducting.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
1-2 July 2022. Fabien Gabel, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones; timpani and strings.