Brahms once claimed that he slept with the score of his Alto Rhapsody under his pillow. Whether this was true is doubtful, but there is little doubt that the work is his most forceful reflection on his own scarred emotional life - a sequence of platonic attachments to idealised women interspersed with encounters with prostitutes.
A bitter study of alienation, the Rhapsody has often been compared to Schubert's Winterreise, with which it shares some of its imagery as a solitary male figure stumbles through a denuded winter landscape that mirrors his anguish. But the tone is different. While Schubert's narrator is protagonist, Brahms's alto is commentator, and tragedy slides towards ambivalent optimism as she pleads with God that the hero might find some eventual solace.
Performances are rare. Assembling the requisite forces is tricky - it runs for only 15 minutes, but the alto is supported by a male chorus singing music of great difficulty. But Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra chose it as the centrepiece of their end-of-season concert.
Mackerras's soloist was Marjana Lipovsek, a thrilling, if at times erratic, vocal actor, who intoned both text and music with furious intensity, plumbing depths of tragedy without becoming sentimental. Mackerras underpinned her declamation with austere tremolos and churning strings. Using the small SCO Chorus in place of the massed male voice choirs that some conductors favour spoke volumes in the final sections, in which Lipovsek's prayer, growing more urgent with each repetition, was echoed by the choir rather than swamped by it. The whole was a harrowing experience, second to none in sheer power.
Mackerras prefaced the work with the Variations on the St Anthony Chorale, in which he exposed layers of extraordinary counterpoint as the famous theme, once attributed to Haydn, is first deconstructed and then resurrected. This was followed by the First Symphony, immaculately judged in its progression from tragedy to elation. Mackerras's understanding of the relationship between feeling and form in Brahms's music was matchless. A truly great concert.
