Monica Mariani

After Volume 1, which was awarded a Diapason d'or, Mariani Klavierquartett continues its journey of discovery, juxtaposing the piano quartets of Johannes Brahms and Friedrich Gernsheim. Although this second album is dominated by Brahms's luminescent A-Major Quartet " his longest " and although the friendship of the two composers stands at the center of this three-part project, Gernsheim's F-Major Quartet shows that not only Brahms numbered among his influences, but that Gernsheim was also able to blend echoes of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert into a convincing personal style. In the hands of the Mariani Piano Quartet, the formal perfection of his fervent work gleams with undreamt-of power.

In the year of social distancing, the Mariani Piano Quartet dedicates itself to a today almost forgotten friendship and embarks with Audax Records upon a voyage of discovery in which the piano quartets of Johannes Brahms are juxtaposed with those by Friedrich Gernsheim. Gernsheim, a child prodigy trained at the renowned Leipzig Conservatory, occupied after a sojourn of several years in Paris, where he experienced the scandal-ridden Tannhauser performances, and became acquainted with Rossini, Saint-Saens, and Lalo important positions in Saarbrucken, Berlin, Cologne, and Rotterdam. Mahler and Strauss held him in high regard and conducted his music. However, after his death his musical legacy fall victim to the anti-Semitic climate in Europe. On the first album of a three-part series, the Mariani Piano Quartet presents Gernsheims sensuously indulging C-Minor Quartet alongside the perhaps best-known work of the genre: the Piano Quartet in G Minor, op. 25, by Brahms with its unbridled energy and symphonic radiance. An intoxicating journey through time into the Romantic period in a captivating interpretation.

“Compositions that already on a first hearing leave behind a uniquely original impression.” This is what klassik-heute.com wrote after the release of CPO’s first CD with piano trios by Emilie Mayer. Her extensive chamber oeuvre for piano also contains two piano quartets. She composed these two works, one in E flat major and the other in G major, at the end of the 1850s. At the time Emilie Mayer was an esteemed composer residing in Berlin: most of her works were performed with success, and she enjoyed broad recognition in music circles. Each of her quartets consists of four movements. Here her model in formal matters was not so much Mozart or Beethoven but Schumann, whose sole Piano Quartet op.47 had been published a good fifteen years before. Considering her music as a whole, we may say that in her piano quartets, just as in her chamber oeuvre in general, Emilie Mayer was a compellingly independent composer with firm rooting in classical models who succeeded in developing a romantic musical language all of her own.