Expressing the composor's upbeat emotion from the beautiful nature of Austria, it was the best piece for this worldclass orchestra. For its unique glory and grand depth, the performance was even better than Berlin Phil's performance that I had listened to in the same venue, Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
The glory felt feminine, coming from the predominantly white male orchestra. Unlike Berlin Phil, which comprises musicians of diverse gender and ethnicities, over 95% of the Vienna Phil players were Caucasian men.
This is my unproved hunch as to why that is the case.
The business of music is to reproduce a beautiful environment. As such, Brahms's second symphony represents the beautiful summer in Austria. That is inherently an artificial process that involves fantacies.
The unique feminine glory of the orchestra might come from the fantacy of the white male collective psyche. If there were many women who look too beautiful, they would be distracting and the male persuit for the beautiful feminine art might be weaken. And the beautfy of beautiful women is so internally self-evident that they essentially don't strive to create another feminine beauty.
This notion might be similar to kabuki, a Japanese theater played by male actors only; even female charcters are played by men. The setting that the actor playing a woman's role is male creates the unique feminine beauty that women are not able to produce, because that is inherently the product of male fantasies.
