Carlo Maria Giulini’s lifelong passion for the music of Brahms first took hold during his teens when he played the composer’s First Symphony as a member of the L’Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Bruno Walter’s direction. Following the liberation of Italy from German occupation in 1944, the young Giulini was invited to conduct Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, the work he’d studied for nine months while hiding underground from the Nazis. The force of his feeling for this Symphony’s blend of lyricism and drama surges through the recording of the work he made with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1969, generating an unashamedly Romantic take on the score. Giulini’s majestic interpretation, backed to the hilt by top-drawer playing, stands in company with equally mature accounts of the Tragic Overture and the Variations on a Theme by Haydn.