Eto Bieri And Meta4*, Johannes Brahms Gérard Pesson Salvatore Sciarrino – Quasi Morendo

Written more than 15 years apart, these two scores, juxtaposed here for the first time, successively illustrate the somewhat morose ‘Nordic’ inspiration of the composer of Ein deutsches Requiem, then a more intimate poetic feeling, and finally a communicative serenity, the headiness of a ‘Hungarian’ dance in the Quartet, a sort of wild csárdás with quasi-orchestral force in the coda of the Quintet.

Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan present Brahms‘ two Cello Sonatas, alongside their arrangement of his Violin Sonata in G Major on the cello. This Brahms portrait is a logical next step after the duo’s acclaimed interpretation of Beethoven’s complete Cello Sonatas, released in 2022. While Beethoven’s sonatas reveal the gradual ascendancy of the cello as the proper solo instrument over the piano, Brahms opens a new chapter in the history of the cello sonata, realizing a glorious marriage of equals between the two instruments.

One might expect Andrew Manze's interpretations of Johannes Brahms' four symphonies to adhere to ideas of the movement for historically informed performance practice, due to his scholarship and dedication to authenticity in his early music performances. However, and somewhat paradoxically, he and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra have delivered more or less mainstream readings on modern instruments; there are no signs of late 19th century woodwind or brass timbres, and the strings play with standard vibrato. Yet Manze's historical fact finding has gone to a deeper level than just replicating instrumentation or orchestral scale, and he has found numerous clues to Brahms' intentions in the composer's transcriptions of the symphonies for two pianos, which often vary with the published orchestral scores in accentuation, tempo indications, and phrasing. These are fine points that can be discerned with careful listening and great familiarity with many other recordings of the symphonies, both conventional and historic, but they may not be the main thing listeners will consider in appreciating this set. The playing and the recording quality are up to the extraordinarily high levels set by CPO in all its releases, and these resilient works sound as good as they ever did under any other conductor.

The two sonatas by Johannes Brahms belong to the Olympus of the repertoire for every cellist, where, together with the suites by Bach and the sonatas by Beethoven, they virtually form the Trinity of our Old Testament. My own journey to these works began sometime in the 1980s and is – of course – still ongoing. I have had the opportunity to play both sonatas with many great pianists and thus get to know them from just as many different musical perspectives. Of course, I grew up with countless outstanding recordings, including a largely unknown one of the F Major Sonata by my own teacher William Pleeth with his wife, Margaret Good, which would also one day deserve to be made available to the public again.

Following the 2011 landmark Beethoven cycle, Riccardo Chailly returns with a recording of the complete Brahms symphonies and orchestral works including the overtures and Haydn Variations. Rarities include world premiere recordings of two piano intermezzi orchestrated by Paul Klengel (brother of the Gewandhaus’ long-standing principal cellist Julius Klengel); the 9 Liebeslieder waltzes; the original first performance version of the Andante of Symphony No. 1 and the even rarer revised opening of the Fourth Symphony. Chailly has radically rethought his approach to these works, re-examining the scores and returning to the recorded interpretations of a generation of conductors alive during Brahms’ lifetime, principally Felix Weingartner and one of his Gewandhaus predecessors Bruno Walter.

On their new release, cellist Markus Hohti and pianist Emil Holmström perform Brahms' two cello sonatas on period instruments. The sonatas were composed at very different stages of the composer's musical career. The sonata in E minor is the first 'duo sonata' that Brahms wrote, and the music still exudes a sense of the Romantic unpredictability so typical of his earlier output, a phenomenon that appears, for instance, in momentary shifts to what might even be considered naïve compositional solutions. The F major sonata, meanwhile, is the work of a mature, experienced composer; it revels in compositional fun and games, and one of its most prominent features is the virtuosic approach to the instrumental writing.

Friends of long standing as well as regular partners in chamber music, Michael Collins and Stephen Hough bring their combined musical insights and expertise to bear on Johannes Brahms’s sonatas for clarinet and piano. Together with the composer’s trio for clarinet, cello and piano and clarinet quintet, the sonatas are among the most treasured works in the repertoire of the instrument – but it is partly down to good luck that we have them at all. When Brahms in 1891 heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he had already announced his retirement. He was enraptured by Mühlfeld’s playing and its vocal qualities, however, and made a ‘comeback’: during the following couple of years he composed all four of his clarinet works.