Brahms: Complete Piano Quartets - Faust, Giuranna, Meunier, Han (2012)

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Brahms: Complete Piano Quartets - Faust, Giuranna, Meunier, Han (2012)

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The chamber works of Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) have long been seen as a window onto the German composer’s rigorous, intricate approach to composition and restrained yet Romantic style. This is true of his piano quartets; although he only composed three, in their individual characters and masterful control of musical material, they are an integral aspect of Brahms’s chamber output.

The Piano Quartet in G minor Op.25, the earliest of Brahms’s works in this genre, reveals the composer’s great creativity. Based on short motifs that are continuously extended and combined to form larger structures, it draws on song-like melodies in the first movement and Hungarian folk music in the finale, to create a work that, at times, seems to stray into the territory of orchestral music.

The second Quartet in A Op.26 is relaxed and expansive in comparison, with flowing, extended melodies that retain a sense of control and poise, while The Piano Quartet No.3 in C minor is the most dramatic, practically operatic in style. Since the initial release of this popular Brilliant Classics recording, its performers have gone from strength to strength. While Isabelle Faust has forged a reputation as one of the leading international violinists, particularly in chamber music, Derek Han, Bruno Giuranna and Alain Meunier are some of the most acclaimed musicians in their fields. Chamber music enthusiasts should not be without this world-class recording in their collections.

Composer: Johannes Brahms
Performer: Derek Han, Bruno Giuranna, Isabelle Faust, Alain Meunier

Reviews: Originally recorded in 1996 (I’m guessing, but not positive, for Delos), these performances appeared on Brilliant Classics in 2003 as part of a 10-CD boxed set containing Brahms’s complete chamber music works. This pared down two-CD set extracts the three piano quartets. The four well-known players—all soloists on their own—come together here to form an ad hoc ensemble.

Brahms addressed himself to the piano quartet medium on three occasions, two fairly early in his career, relatively speaking, and one both early and later. The G-Minor and A-Major Quartets (born head to toe between late 1861 and early 1862) are fraternal twins. The op. 25, stormy and eruptive, with a wild Rondo alla zingarese finale, was the piece that Schoenberg—an early defender of Brahms against the “progressive” cabal—chose to orchestrate. In this guise, it was premiered by Otto Klemperer conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1938.

In contrast, the A-Major Quartet contains some of Brahms’s most lyrical and longing passages. Other than these two works, Brahms was not much engaged in the writing of chamber music around this time. Much of his effort in the years between 1859 and 1862—with the exception of the sets of Handel and Schumann variations for solo piano—was focused on vocal and choral pieces.

The C-Minor Quartet is one of those works that underwent Brahms’s surgical knife to emerge with a new and almost unrecognizable face. Like the B-Major Piano Trio, op. 8, which was drastically revised in 1889, 35 years after it was originally composed, the C-Minor Piano Quartet was radically altered in 1875. The original version was in C? Minor, and actually predates the G-Minor and A-Major Quartets by several years, having been first conceived in 1855.

Generally speaking, Brahms’s works in a given medium become shorter, more condensed, and more cryptic in chronological order. That is certainly true of the three piano quartets. The op. 60 is not only the shortest of the three, but its character is grim and its mode of expression terse, which makes us wish that the all-too-brief moments of melodic generosity would come more often and stay longer when they do arrive. Even the string repetition of the first movement’s second theme at 2:25 is reduced to a series of gestures rather than a full statement of the melody. But increasingly, this became Brahms’s way, until we reach the near stasis and silence of some of the late solo piano pieces.

The piano quartets are well represented in the catalog, and my preference is still for Domus, now available for only one dollar more as a two-disc set on Virgin Classics’s budget label. Still, these performances on Brilliant Classics are topnotch, the recordings have held up well, and at $9.99 for the two-disc set, it’s an irresistible bargain for any Brahms-lover.