Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner Soli Deo Gloria SDG 705 ***

John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique recorded Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in concert in 2008, in a series that contextualised the symphonies through the music of contemporaries and old masters the composer loved, as well as less well-known pieces of his own. The Fourth Symphony is here preceded by Beethoven’s

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Overture, Gabrieli, Schütz, Bach, and choral music by Brahms. The build-up is fabulous but the symphony itself, lean-sounding and with a very special rangeof effects from natural horns (which Brahms favoured), is sometimes almost strait- jacketed by the classicism of the approach. However, anyone in search of an alternative to expressively overblown, pot-bellied Brahms will surely be delighted. The scherzo positively races and sparkles. See url.ie/4oxv