Lahav Shani conducts Brahms's Symphony No. 4

The superb Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra harnesses its considerable forces of expression and dynamism to perform the final symphony by Johannes Brahms, one of the greatest masterpieces of the Romantic era, under the baton of maestro Lahav Shani! Scholars like Kenneth Hull have noted the ways in which Brahms's magnificent Symphony No. 4 in E minor breaks with convention, including the complexity of its ineluctible thematic unfolding and the tragic character that imbues the entire work — "a direct challenge," Hull writes, "to the long-standing convention, established by Beethoven in his Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and virtually inviolable thereafter, that minor-key symphonies should end triumphantly in the major mode." Few symphonies make grander use of the minor mode, from the haunting opening measures of the first movement to the ingeniously wrought passacaglia of the finale, richly allusive with shades of the master J.S. Bach himself.