Every period-instrument outfit has its shtick – its own version of what “historically informed performance” might mean. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays music from an increasingly generous historical tranche (Stravinsky beckons next season) but always on instruments dating from the same period as the works being performed. Except when they don’t.
This performance marking the OAE’s 40th anniversary was not about imagining what certain compositions might have sounded like to their first audiences. Instead, it reproduced the exact programme of a concert held in Vienna on 7 March 1897. The 19th-century concert was the latest instalment in a series run by the eminent conductor Hans Richter, which turned out to be the final concert ever attended by Johannes Brahms, who died aged 63 just under a month later. Today, in an alternative take on music-historical reenactment, we thus heard Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and Haydn’s Symphony No 73, “La Chasse”, played in that order, with the auditorium lights still up, and on instruments all dating from Brahms’s time.
