Age concern | 9 February 2017

Brahms didn’t always have a beard. The picture in the London Symphony Orchestra’s programme book showed him clean-shaven, and rightly. The beard didn’t reach its final imposing form until 1878, around the time Brahms started sketching his Second Piano Concerto. (‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle,’ he wrote to his friend Bernhard Scholz, ‘for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful.’) But this concert opened with the First Piano Concerto, premièred in January 1859 when the composer was still a few months short of his 26th birthday. Younger, in fact, than tonight’s conductor — the 26-year-old Alpesh Chauhan — and not much older than the soloist, Benjamin Grosvenor.

Age shouldn’t really matter in music, but it does. Classical musicians are generally assumed to ripen with age: it’s why Sir Simon Rattle (62) is only now reckoned to be entering his prime. There’s something in that, though for every moment of rich, mature insight you’re as likely to hear a celebrity septuagenarian coasting on autopilot through an interpretation that’s been set solid for decades. Nonetheless, gerontophilia is endemic among classical music buffs of the record-collector type. At worst, it can breed a cynicism about young talent; the notion that an artist needs to have given the Reith Lectures before he or she can have anything worthwhile to say about Schubert, a composer who died at the age of 31.

Chauhan and Grosvenor’s Brahms wasn’t definitive (whatever that means), and I doubt that either of them wanted it to be. I’ve known Chauhan since he was a teenage cellist in Birmingham, and part of me was hoping for an earthquake — perhaps, if I’m honest, something to measure against Clifford Curzon and George Szell’s 1962 recording (see, we’re none of us immune to it).