Could one have imagined a more perfect concert with which to finish WASO’s 2024 classical concert season than this all-Brahms feast? I think not.

Like the Taylor Swift of I Look in People’s Windows, Brahms was “addicted to the ‘If only’.” My Brahms is the composer of the late piano pieces and all those other intimate works within which an unconsummated passion for Clara Schumann represents the ineluctable grace of love’s evanescence.

It’s a credit to WASO Principal Conductor Asher Fisch that this (quint)essential intimacy was subsumed neither by the festive brilliance of the Academic Festival Overture, nor the passionate melancholy writ large of the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, nor Luciano Berio’s expansive reimagining, for orchestra and soloist (here, WASO Principal Clarinet Allan Meyer), of the Clarinet Sonata No. 1.

Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture Op. 80, written in 1880 following a commission by the student fraternity Germania at the Technical University of Hanover, exhibits a sophistication which belies its festive nature. On this occasion, it made for a rousing overture, Fisch and WASO effortlessly pointing up the folk and learned elements throughout the contrasting sections with an exuberance which nevertheless allowed for plenty of more subtle light and shade.

More casually...