With his Violin Concerto Brahms was often accused of having embedded the solo violin too deeply within the orchestra. When looking at his two piano concertos, his intention seems to have been rather to write symphonic concerts as virtuoso solo pieces with orchestral accompaniment. “Because of the dialogues in the orchestra between violins and wind instruments and the accompanying figures of the solo violins, the concert seems to me rather like a piece of chamber music”, tells us Emilio Percan and decided to record the Violin Concerto without a conductor. The matter of instrumentation is crucial in this context. Example for Percan is the Meininger Hofkapelle, which premiered many of Brahms’ pieces and played with almost half of the violins than other orchestras of the time (and of today!). Brahms, however, had an exact idea of how the orchestral arrangement should look like for his pieces. For the performance of one of his symphonies in Boston, he was to sketch the desired setup and made a drawing which was the model for the present recording. The result is a completely new listening experience which brings both the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony closer to chamber music, thereby allowing hitherto unknown aspects of the music to arise.