Vienna Philharmonic & Simon Rattle, Barbican, review The Vienna Philharmonic could lay proprietorial claim to Brahms's Third Symphony, since it was the orchestra's class of 1883 that gave the premiere of it under Hans Richter. Here, with Simon Rattle conducting, the VPO embraced the symphony like an old friend, a friend moreover who is well-built, genial, muscularly toned and flab-free. But the performance was outshone in many respects by the one of Schumann's Third Symphony after the interval. Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra came in between. The platform heaved with the extra players Webern demanded for this concise work, even in the slightly stripped-down 1928 revision played here, but the textures were astonishingly lucid, the musical gestures incisive and pungent, the effect direct and striking in impact. The same, in a completely different stylistic context, could be said of the Schumann. It has long been shown that Schumann's orchestration, which received opinion claims to be congested and opaque, can gleam with translucency if treated with the right understanding of its constituent parts. Sometimes clarity can be achieved by means of slimming down the string sections so that the woodwind and brass can have their proper say. The Vienna Philharmonic, however, fielded a sizeable complement, and yet the balance was so finely judged that the mixes and shifts of colour were simply a joy to hear. The horns, mellow of timbre and beautifully blended, made a glorious sound when exposed in the scherzo and, particularly, in the vision of Cologne Cathedral that forms the fourth movement, but in fact the entire palette of instrumental sonority came alive. That extraordinary velvet sheen that the VPO strings have as their trademark was fully in evidence, with a real depth of sound built up from the double basses and reinforced by the cohesion of the sections in the higher ranges, but it was also a sheen that allowed for an impressive spectrum of detail in the symphony's fabric. There was detail, too, in the Brahms, but at times - especially in the leisurely third movement - it could be pernickety and obtrusive rather than, as in the Schumann, contributing to a broadly conceived and organic whole. That old trick of attempting to make a crescendo sound more imposing by suddenly reducing the volume at the start (even when it is not marked in the score) began to seem like an affectation here, but it only marginally detracted from an otherwise impeccably manicured, stirring performance.