Filmed live at London’s Barbican Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the London Symphony Orchestra through Johannes Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11 with chamber-scaled buoyancy. Born at Detmold from Brahms’s admiration for court hornist August Cordes, whose “rich, mellow tone” biographer Florence May celebrated, the score initially perplexed an 1859 Hamburger Nachrichten reviewer who wished Brahms would “not go out of his way to cut strange capers.” May herself judged that while individual movements seem “irresistible from their grace, daintiness, or romance,” the opening Allegro molto’s proportions can burden the whole. Tilson Thomas avoids both Kurt Masur’s heavy Leipzig gait and the hard-driven press of lesser readings, matching the vernal freshness of István Kertész’s benchmark 1967 LSO recording and Claudio Abbado’s Mahler Chamber Orchestra account. From the principal horn’s rustic D-major call over a drone bass (0:47), warm woodwind dialogues between dark-toned flute and velvety oboe dance effortlessly, while four horns and copper timpani propel the closing Rondo’s exhilarating brassy surge (41:56).