With a cherry on top

Despite its ostensibly festive sounds, Brahms's Fourth Symphony presents a vortex of despair, writes Tom Service. Perfect, then, for the Christmas season!

- Tom Service

It's Christmas. And Johannes Brahms has the best beard in the business, so what gifts does he bear this festive season? Cherries! But cherries that don't ripen - in fact, cherries whose musical putrefaction heralds the end of an era of hope. Merry humbugging Brahmsmas with his Fourth Symphony!

The irony is that the Fourth Symphony - composed in 1884-5 in Mürzzuschlag, where Brahms said the cherries never ripen, and he worried his symphony might not either - is also a piece that makes the most superficially festive sounds that Brahms ever created in a symphony. The scherzo even includes a tinkling, twangling triangle, so surely it's a cavalcade of joy?