Kleiner Brahms Esoteric

Soli Deo Gloria is proud to release the third instalment in the successful Brahms Symphony series which sees John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique explore the music of Johannes Brahms.

Few musical partnerships have elicited such divergent critical opinions as Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado in Brahms’s two piano concertos. Reviewing the First Concerto in April 1999, Richard Osborne found ‘a lack of quickness and intelligence in the inner-part playing’ while missing ‘any real sense of interaction between soloist and orchestra’. A year earlier Bryce Morrison, in his review of the Second Concerto, had found it ‘impossible to think of them apart, their unity [here] is so indissoluble’. BM also praised what he heard as ‘a granitic reading stripped of all surplus gesture, preening mannerism or overt display, intent only on the unveiling of a musical or moral truth’.

This album concludes The Brahms Trio's five-volume survey of the piano trio in Russia with remarkable works by composers whose names have all but disappeared from the musical world's collective memory. Vladimir Dyck, a student of Widor at the Paris Conservatoire, took French nationality in 1910 but his life came to a tragic end when he and his family were arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. His Piano Trio, Op. 25 contrasts Russian soulfulness with the lightness and deft scoring he brought to his film compositions. Constantin von Sternberg's genial Op. 104 reflects his career as a virtuoso pianist, while Sergey Youferov's expansive and nostalgic Op. 52 is a farewell to the Russian 'Silver Age', a world about to be destroyed by revolution.

It's the late Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, that get the big print on the cover of this release by the awe-inspiring baritone Matthias Goerne, but actually the music on the album falls into a neat early-middle-late classification scheme. The group of middle-period settings of poetry by Heinrich Heine doesn't even get graphics on the cover, but these are fascinating. Brahms wrote a lot of songs, but you couldn't do better than the selection and performances here for a cornerstone collection item. Beyond the sheer beauty of Goerne's voice is an ability to shift gears to match how Brahms' style evolved. If you want to hear his real slashing, operatic high notes, check out the Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, settings of poems by the minor poets Georg Friedrich Daumer and Karl August Graf von Platen. These rather overwrought texts add up to a kind of slimmed-down Winterreise, and they catch the spirit of the still-young Brahms with his strong passions, elegantly controlled. The Heine settings, which come from several different sets of lieder, are not that often heard and are in some ways the most compelling of the group here.

Brahms' only Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, had a turbulent history before finally taking its rightful place as one of the composer's most sublime chamber works. The quintet began its life as a string quintet; pressure coming from Brahms' friends eventually saw the string quintet's score destroyed in place of a sonata for two pianos. Though Brahms was fond of this version, further suggestions found hard at work on a third and final change in instrumentation, which resulted in the work we know today. At only 31 years of age, the sophistication found in this score is nothing short of profound. Brahms varies the voicing to achieve a nearly symphonic sound on one end and a tenderly intimate chamber feeling on the other.

The music of Austrian composer Robert Fuchs attracted faint praise from Brahms, who supported Fuchs but remarked that he was "never really profound." Brahms was notoriously stingy with praise for other composers, however, and the comment is not quite fair. Yes, the Fuchs Clarinet Quintet in E flat major, Op. 102, recorded here is clearly modeled on the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, that accompanies it on the album, right down to the episodic series of variations that makes the finale.

Rudolf Buchbinder, the doyen of Austrian pianists, plays Max Reger’s rarely heard, lovingly crafted transcriptions of his idol Johannes Brahms’s most beautiful lieder, about which Reger said: “In the case of such masterpieces, any embellishment and any attempt to introduce a note of brilliance would be an unheard-of act of vandalism. I mean to adopt a different approach by bringing out the vocal line and, where possible, retaining the original accompaniment in the most faithful way that I can!”

This is the third and final disc of the Mandelring Quartet's survey of the complete string quartets of Johannes Brahms. It is the third disc because the German group has ingeniously coupled each of Brahms' three quartets with works written by his friends and contemporaries. Thus the first volume coupled Brahms' C minor Quartet with the A minor Quartet of Friedrich Gernsheim, the second volume coupled Brahms' B flat major Quartet with the G minor Quartet of Heinrich von Herzogenberg, and this third volume couples Brahms' A minor Quartet with the F major Quartet of Felix Otto Dessoff.

Richter was always a fan of Schubert's Piano music. He recorded over half of the Sonatas, the Wanderer Fantasie, some of the Impromptus and the Trout Piano Quintet to name a few works. Early in his career he would tear through impromptus, and play the Wander Fantasie with force and power. Fast forward much later at this point when these Sonatas were performed, and Richter was still playing some of the most difficult works in piano repertoire, such as Prokofiev Sonatas, Chopin Etudes and Liszt. In the case of these of composers its hard not to be inclined to be enjoy his earlier recordings more, but that is not the case here with Schubert.

Maurizio Pollini's second Deutsche Grammophon release with Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden is a live concert recording of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2, a fitting follow-up to his successful 2011 CD of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. That recording marked Pollini's triumphant return to Dresden, but this 2013 recording is less about the significance of the concert and more about the consolidation of Pollini's working relationship with Thielemann and the orchestra.