After-post: As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

TUESDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Now that I can hear the audio clips in place, I've added some notes on the First Quartet performances

One-stop shopping: I love the Borodin Trio, and I really love this set, so much so that we're going to dip into it twice. For openers, here's the Borodin playing the dramatic first-movement Allegro of the Brahms First Piano Quartet (in G minor, Op. 25):


Borodin Trio (Luba Edlina, piano; Rostislav Dubinsky, violin; Yuli Turovsky, cello); with Rivka Golani, viola. Chandos, recorded in Layer Marney Church, Colchester (England), July 14-16, 1988

by Ken

In Sunday's post, "Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it," you may recall that I flirted with the idea of expanding my tiny-clip offering of the opening of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, Op. 26, to include a corresponding sliver of the opening of its vastly different fraternal twin, the G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25. For once, though, I exercised restraint, and remained steadfast even when I was tempted to shoehorn in additional mini-clips as an update.

The idea wouldn't quit me, however. And since the subject we're exploring is the way Brahms, despite his habitual use of existing musical forms, tended to reinvent them pretty much every time he worked in them, it quickly occurred to me that it would actually be easier -- far less labor-intensive -- to plunk in whole movements rather than do the grindingly picky work of making mini-clips, and to do so for all three of the piano quartets.


HERE AT SUNDAY CLASSICS WE'VE PONDERED THE
BRAHMS PIANO QUARTETS ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS

Is the slightest of them perhaps the mightiest of Brahms's piano quartets?

Pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Salvatore Accardo, violist Antonine Tamestit, and cellist Gautier Capuçon play the gorgeous third-movement Andante of Brahms's C minor Piano Quartet, at the 2008 Verbier Festival.

by Ken

As I wrote when I brought up the subject of the third of Brahms's three piano quartets, and wound up presenting only his Second Cello Sonata, the performance of the C minor Quartet I heard in Ian Hobson's New York Brahms piano series, with violinist Andrés Cárdenes, violist Csaba Erdélyi, and cellist Ko Isawaki, finally pushed the piece over the top for me.

The first thing to say about that performance was that it was loud. Oh, not all the time, but when the piece heated up, so did the musicians. (Hobson himself seems more comfortable playing loudly than playing softly, which is harder.) And the first thing to say about the piece is that it is enormously physical. A lot of the melodic material lends itself, even cries out for, real vehemence. It's not just a matter of playing loudly, of course, and certainly not of playing fast -- it's an issue of musical energy, the sort of thing we've heard described so well in pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg's letter to the composer regarding the Second Cello Sonata (quoted in the program book for Professor Hobson's series), and the way she imagined he would have played the Scherzo -- better than anyone else -- "agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive."

The piece is so greatly compressed; how it surges forward! The concise development is so exciting, and the augmented return of the first theme is such a surprise! Needless to say, we reveled in the beautiful warm sounds of the Adagio, and especially at the magnificent moment when we find ourselves again in F-sharp major, which sounds so marvelous. I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive.

In Friday night's preview we heard the scherzo movements of the three Brahms piano quartets, and I think von Herzogenberg's description could serve as an inspiration for performers. That phrase "inwardly restless and propulsive" seems to me to apply equally well to most of the composer's writing.

I thought we would start today by extending Friday's experiment, and hearing the same two sets of performers play the slow movements ot the three Brahms piano quartets. Like the C minor Quartet as a whole, the Andante is written on a noticeably more intimate scale than its predecessors, but I think you'll agree that all three are stunners.

Preview: It's Hungarians vs. Russians in three Brahms scherzos

Arnaud Sussmann, Jonathan Vinocour, Michael Nicolas, and Orion Weiss play the Scherzo of the Brahms Third Piano Quartet at the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, July 29, 2012. (Not much snorting and grunting here, not to mention inward restlessness or inward propulsion.)

by Ken

Or, to be more accurate it's a Brahms intermezzo and two scherzos, though the Intermezzo in question clearly functions as the scherzo, or at any rate scherzo-equivalent, of the work in question. ("Intermezzo" is a term that Brahms came to use to describe, well, pretty much anything, as witness the assorted intermezzos for solo piano.)

And the works in question are the three Brahms piano quartets. We've devoted a fair amount of attention to this extraordinary chunk of the composer's output, but always focusing on either the First or Second, the haunted and haunting G minor and the luscious, discursive A major. As I mentioned two weeks ago in connection with Brahms's Second Cello Sonata (preview, "Brahms in snorting-and-grunting mode," and main post, "Thinking of the 'snorting and grunting' Brahms's 'inwardly restless and propulsive' piano playing"), the work I really wanted to get to was the last and most compact of the three piano quartets, the C minor. I don't think the C minor Quartet is often accorded the same respect as the G minor and A major, but as I also said, I've had my eye on it for a while now, suspecting that, just as the grander, friendlier A major Quartet had earlier overtaken the grimmer, more brooding G minor as my favorite, the C minor Quartet was fixing to make its move.

Ths "snorting and grunting," I should explain for the benefit of those just joining us, comes from a description of the composer's piano playing by the pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, who had been playing his Second Cello Sonata with the same cellist, Robert Hausmann, with whom the composer had recently given the first public performance, and wrote a fascinating letter to the composer, of which a chunk was quoted in the notes that accompanied Ian Hobson's recent series of the complete Brahms solo and chamber works for the piano, including this about the Scherzo:

I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive.

THIS WEEK WE'RE GOING TO TAKE A CLOSER
LOOK AT BRAHMS'S THIRD PIANO QUARTET