Brahms Piano Quartet

With the proliferation of more and more recording labels and still more ensembles getting the opportunity to record their work, it is obviously increasingly difficult to bring anything truly original when performing works from the standard repertoire. Unfortunately, this fact may lead to some questionable performance decisions in striving for originality. Such seems to be the case with the Leopold String Trio and Marc-André Hamelin and their performance of the Brahms piano quartets.

Richter on the road in Tours France, with no studio in sight, and with a great Russian string quartet in a live performance. This enterprise in thoroughly inspired. Good tempi throughout and nothing drags. There is great interplay between Richter and the Borodins. They milk the lyrical content of the first movement and build the finale to its electrifying finale.

In its new Brahms album, the Notos Quartet crosses the boundary between chamber music and the symphony. Alongside the First Piano Quartet, Op. 25, the four musicians have also recorded an arrangement of Brahms’s Third Symphony, Op. 90, specifically prepared for them by Andreas N. Tarkmann. To a certain extent, Arnold Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’s Op. 25 for full orchestra inspired this idea.

It was something of a surprise to be reminded that this recording was made thirty-eight years ago. I've been re-listening to it and Rattle's later recording with the Berlin Philharmonic recently and found my memories confirmed. The Berliners are a great orchestra, make a sumptuous sound, and Rattle is on fine form. And yet, it is the intensity of the Bournemouth performance that is the more gripping for me: it is constantly on the edge, just as Mahler was as he struggled to get the outline of this intensely personal music onto paper in the last summer of his life.

With a "bonus" eighth track of the Rondo alla Zingarese-Presto from Brahms' First Piano Quartet filling out this CD to a near maximal 75 minutes and 55 seconds, this disc is a steal. The Double Concerto by Brahms is an energetic and riveting yet enigmatic addition to the concerto repertoire. With a combination of solo instruments not widely used since the Baroque era due to their contrasting sounds, this work presents some unique challenges in finding the proper balance between orchestra, solo violin, and solo cello.

This new album of two piano quartets by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) consists of pianist Lars Vogt's last recordings. Before his premature death and between treatments, Lars Vogt was able to record a multi-award-winning album of piano chamber music works by Schubert together with Christian Tetzlaff and Tanja Tetzlaff, as well as albums of Mozart's and Mendelssohn's piano concertos. However, a project to record Brahms' complete piano quartets was left unfinished after the studio recording of Piano Quartet No. 2 was completed.

In composing the Quartet No.1 in G min op.25 for piano and strings (and op.26) - his first truly important chamber works - Brahms - being the fervent classicist that he was - looked back to some important models to emulate and renew, he composed his own diptych of quartets with piano with other significant diptychs of pieces for strings and piano in mind: Mozart's Quartets K 478 and K 493 (Mozart's K 478 and Brahms' op. 25 are both in G min), Beethoven's two Trios op.70, Schubert's two Trios op.99 and 100.