- Both are really fun to play, as a bass player, at least. A few woodshed-worthy licks, loud bits, quiet bits, etc.
- The Brahms appeals to me on an intellectual level; the Tchaikovsky on an emotional level
- Technically (mostly in terms of formal procedures) the Tchaikovsky is a bit of a mess. On the other hand, I can't think of many pieces that are more tightly constructed than Brahms 2.
- Both composers play with rhythm (particularly the sense of the downbeat) in interesting ways in these symphonies
- As music theorists, we seem to pay much more attention to Brahms than we do to Tchaikovsky.
- The Tchaikovsky has a "hidden program;" Brahms' symphony is absolute music.
- The Tchaikovsky starts and ends with the double basses (advantage: Tchaikovsky).
I remember my undergraduate music history teacher saying that Tchaikovsky was very conscious of the fact that "his seams showed." Tchaikovsky couldn't write a transition to save his life, in my opinion: his music stops and then starts again with something new. Brahms's symphony, on the other hand, could be seen as one big transition (I think of it in terms of Schoenberg's "developing variation"; I'm not judging either of them on this basis). It almost seems that Tchaikovsky went out of his way in the sixth symphony to foreground these seams. Consider the transition from the slow introduction to the allegro:
There is a lot of space written into this transition: a fermata over the rest after the V6 chord, and three full beats of rest before the theme starts up. The entire first movement is very much a patchwork, where things come to a stop, there's a pause, and then we start up again with something new.
The melodic material in the second movement is unusually simple: few people can make scales sound as good as Tchaikovsky. The theme with an ascending scale from mi to do, coming to rest on sol, then another ascending scale from sol to mi, coming to rest on re. The melody then features two descending scale fragments. The second theme (in the B section) consists largely of a B minor scale, articulated from sol to sol. The pedal D in the bass throughout this section does a wonderful job of creating a hazy sense of D major-meets-B minor.
The third movement is so loud, raucous, and joyful. I don't think I've played it or heard it performed where the audience didn't wildly applaud after it. (I'm fine with that.)
The joyous third movement makes the fourth movement sound so much more bleak: they're perfect foils. This movement too is quite a pastiche with lots of silences, and of course it fades away into nothingness.
Then there's the matter of the "hidden program," which most people have come to accept as Tchaikovsky's grappling with his homosexual identity in Russia's oppressive political environment and ultimately killing himself. Marina Ritzarev has a new book coming out that challenges this interpretation. In her pre-concert lecture at the Creative Diaspora conference, she suggested that the work might be a setting of the Passion of Christ, and made some rather compelling arguments.
All of this boils down to the following assertion that has been rolling around in my brain for the last few weeks: in the case of Tchaikovsky's symphony, the form is subservient to the content. In the Brahms, the form is the content. Music theorists (and musicologists, in a different way, I think) have an easier time talking about form, and can point to all of the "flaws" or "deformations" exhibited by the Tchaikovsky: gaps between sections, simplistic melodies, etc. We have a much harder time talking about content (why is Tchaikovsky's piece so affecting?).
What say you?