Brahms Piano Quartet

Their recording of the American Quartet and String Quartet No. 13, Op. 106 (Gramophone Award - Recording of the Year), elevated the Pavel Haas Quartet among the finest performers of Antonín Dvorák's music. This position was subsequently confirmed by a recording of the composer's quintets, made with the violist Pavel Nikl, a founding member of the ensemble, and the pianist Boris Giltburg, winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. The album received the most coveted classical music accolades (Gramophone Chamber Award, BBC Radio 3 Record Review Discs of the Year, Diapason d'Or, etc.). While recording the Dvorák quintets, the logical idea of a Brahms album was born.

The Amadeus were the most successful and highly-regarded Quartet of the 20th century. Benefitting from the jet aeroplane and from the record industry s ability to reach out to world, they dominated chamber music making for nearly 40 years.

The Amadeus were the most successful and highly-regarded Quartet of the 20th century. Benefitting from the jet aeroplane and from the record industry s ability to reach out to world, they dominated chamber music making for nearly 40 years. But concert tours are only successful if reviews are ecstatic and audiences delighted. They both were. For nearly 40 years, the Quartet (who styled themselves The Wolf-Gang ) roved the world, argued, celebrated and worked like no other group, and changed not a single member: Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel, Peter Schidlof and Martin Lovett had a recording career from 1951 to 1987, ending only with the death of Peter Schidlof in 1987.

These two performances derive from a concert given at the 16th International Pharos Chamber Music Festival, Cyprus, in 2016. The performers involved clearly play together regularly, certainly at Pharos, apart from their impressive individual credentials. Some, like Yevgeny Sudbin and Alexander Chausian, have well established partnerships on record.

These extraordinary performances were recorded live at the Herodes Atticus Odeon in Athens in 2004 and offer the first musical encounter between Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle. One-time rivals for the post of principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, they here unite, happy to pay tribute to each other in a performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto of an epic grandeur and raw emotional intensity. Barenboim, pianist, conductor and political activist, has clearly reached the pinnacle of a dazzling career (a prophecy of his recent London performances of the complete Beethoven sonatas and concertos) that has ranged from prodigy to the fullest maturity. Caught on this form, few musicians can approach him in stature. Rattle launches the opening tutti with an explosive force, and after an oddly stiff and self-conscious entry (music that Tovey claimed as equal to anything in Bach’s St Matthew Passion) he quickly declares his true status, playing with a dark eloquence and with a breadth and range of inflection that allows him to savour every detail. Rarely can the first movement’s coda have emerged with such frenzied emotion, and here in particularly both Barenboim and Rattle combine to sound like King Lear raging against the universe (“Blow winds and crack your cheeks…”). The second movement, Brahms’s response to Schumann’s attempted suicide, is weighted with an almost unbearable significance and intensity, and in the finale Wolf’s strange dictum, “Brahms cannot exult”, is turned topsy-turvy.

The Fauré Quartet offers a very attractive pairing of Brahms’ Op. 25 & Op. 60 piano quartets. The Op. 25 (Piano Quartet No. 1) sounds so fully fleshed-out that you wonder why Schoenberg felt obliged to arrange it for orchestra. His complaint was that the piano played too loudly for him to hear the string instruments–not so in this performance. All instruments sound with clarity and detail, even with the pianist’s assertive and emotive playing. (The recording’s spacious acoustic and expertly judged balances may have much to do with this.) The Fauré’s performance emphasizes the music’s rich lyricism (particularly in the slow movement) but also its lively rhythms–most prominently in the wildly dancing finale, here done with impeccable style and engaging fervor.

This new recording by Gävle Symphony Orchestra with conductor Jaime Martín is a tribute to the work of Johannes Brahms (18331897). The art of Brahms has inspired countless of artists and composers since the 19th century up to our times. Arnold Schoenberg was one of the composers who greatly admired Brahms work. Schoenberg was particularly fond of Brahms 1st Piano Quartet (Op. 25) and when Otto Klemperer suggested him to orchestrate it in 1937, Schoenberg took the task without hesitation. Schoenberg regarded his reworking of the Piano Quartet often dubbed as Brahms Fifth as an act of homage to Brahms, and he believed he had finally succeeded in addressing the composers concerns about the original score. No wonder that Schoenbergs masterful arrangement has remained in the concert programs of symphony orchestras.

The Brodsky Quartet presents this second volume in its exploration of Brahms’s complete string quartets. The first, which also featured the Clarinet Quintet with Michael Collins, received numerous enthusiastic reviews, The Guardian praising the players for their ‘immaculate’ performance. The String Quartet, Op. 51 No. 1, featured here, was written alongside its contrasting companion, Op. 51 No. 2. Both were finally published in 1873 after having been held back for years by a typically self-doubting Brahms, until he had brought them to his own high standards of perfection.