BaL 27.11.21 - Brahms: String Quintet no. 1 in F major, Op. 88

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

9.30 Building a Library
Natasha Loges compares recordings of Brahms’s String Quintet No 1 in F major, Op 88, and chooses her favourite.

Brahms composed his String Quintet No 1 in F major in 1882 during a summer sojourn in the Austrian Spa town of Bad Ischl. Like the Mozart string quintets, it is written for two violins, two violas and one cello and Brahms intimated to his friend Clara Schumann that it is one of his finest works. To his publisher, Simrock, he said ‘that you have never before had such a beautiful work from me’.

The Quintet comprises three movements: a glowing Allegro non troppo ma con brio and an exuberant fugal finale bookend an expansive and passionate slow movement.


Available versions:-


Amadeus Quartet, Cecil Aronowitz
Bartók Quartet, György Konrád *
Brandis Quartett, Brett Dean
Budapest String Quartet, Walter Trampler
Pierre Fouchenneret, Shuichi Okada, Lise Berthaud, Adrien Boisseau, François Salque
Guarneri Quartet, Pinchas Zukerman *
Hagen Quartett, Gérard Caussé
Mandelring Quartett, Roland Glassl
Ferdinand Mezger, Alfred Malecek, Kunio Tsuchiya, Dietrich Gerhardt, Peter Steiner
Max Hobart, Joseph Silvertstein, Burton Fine, Patricia McCarty, Jules Eskin *
Juilliard String Quartet, Walter Trampler *
Rainer Kußmaul, Ulf Hoelscher, Jurgen Kussmaul, Ulrich Koch, Martin Ostertag *
Leipzig String Quartet, Hartmut Rohde
Ludwig Quartet, Bruno Pasquier
Nash Ensemble
New Zealand String Quartet, Maria Lambros
Quartetto Energie Nove, Vladimir Mendelssohn
Quartetto Sandro Materassi, Olga Arzilli *
Quartetto Sandro Materassi, Danilo Rossi *
Raphael Ensemble *
Shanghai Quartet., Arnold Steinhardt
Sine Nomine Quartet, Raphael Oleg *
Takács Quartet, Lawrence Power
Uppsala Chamber Soloists
Verdi Quartet, etc.
Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet, etc.
Vienna String Sextet
WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne Chamber Players

* = download only

[richardfinegold]

I saw last recording on the list listed in a dealer of excess stock and purchased the SACD perhaps a year ago because it filled a lacunae in my collection. I dug out the reviews later which were underwhelming although it seems well played and recorded to me. So this one will interest me.

[RichardB]

The quintets are among the handful of pieces by Brahms that I'm able to appreciate. The Hagen/Caussé recording was an obvious choice for me and I haven't felt the need to investigate any others. If only more people played Brahms like they do.

[Serial_Apologist]

The quintets are among the handful of pieces by Brahms that I'm able to appreciate. The Hagen/Caussé recording was an obvious choice for me and I haven't felt the need to investigate any others. If only more people played Brahms like they do.

It's the sense of "avoidance" that always fascinates me about Brahms's music - the feeling at various stages that chances later people who appreciated his contribution would seize upon are being sidestepped at all costs. A low-risk composer who squeezed everything he could out of the conventions he inherited from Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn.

[RichardB]

Mind you I much prefer the G major quintet.

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, you can't fault BaL for these Chamber Music choices, can you?

First thought - too soon after Mozart K563! Still in medias res there. (No bad thing, for far longer...one for the death-bed...or at least the fantasy of it...)
But another key work for me, in an extraordinarily self-critical chamber output which seems to consist entirely of masterpieces: quartets, sextets, piano trios, violin sonatas, quintets (latter, probably the least known....)...

All those chamber-musical and instrumental recompositions around those earlier orchestral works....Brahms was agonising (and taking risks as he so often did - cf 1st Symphony finale and much more)....
We could do with a feature film about it, with Robert & Clara...shot on location around the Rhine, with Mads Mikkelson as Brahms....

[Darloboy]

As I don't think this quintet has ever been covered by BaL before, I'm not going to complain about the producers' lack of imagination for a change!

[CallMePaul]

Mind you I much prefer the G major quintet.

Agreed! Could not the two quintets have been discussed together as they are almost always coupled on a single CD?

I have the Takács/ Power version of the two quintets and will need some persuasion to change or add to this.

[rauschwerk]

It's the sense of "avoidance" that always fascinates me about Brahms's music - the feeling at various stages that chances later people who appreciated his contribution would seize upon are being sidestepped at all costs. A low-risk composer who squeezed everything he could out of the conventions he inherited from Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn.

And yet - did not Schoenberg call him 'Brahms the Progressive'?

If it were not for Brahms and Dvorak, we would have a lot less excellent chamber music from the second half of the 19th century.

[gurnemanz]

As I don't think this quintet has ever been covered by BaL before, I'm not going to complain about the producers' lack of imagination for a change!

We did have our own discussion of the Quintets a few years ago. http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...tring-Quintets

For many years the only recording I had was the Berlin Octet on the Philips Brahms Chamber box. Surprisingly no longer available. My most recent acquisition was the 1937 Budapest Quartet with the British violist, Alfred Hobday, recorded at Abbey Road in 1937. (Their later version with Walter Trampler is the one listed - 1958, so presumably also mono). Well worth a listen in decent sound for its age. I got it via the very interesting and well-priced Diapason Brahms Chamber historical selection.
I note that it is also available from Pristine.

[richardfinegold]

At the risk of going OT, the Sextets have been part of my core listening since I encountered them on a Music from Marlboro lp. Somehow the Quintets have slipped under my radar, relatively speaking. The sextets seem almost Symphonic in their breadth, with the Quintets having more of a Chamber Music feel.
Brahms was one of the editors when the music of Schubert was being prepared into performing editions, and I wonder if he was ever tempted to write a Quintet featuring 2 Cellos or one with Double Bass and Piano

[jayne lee wilson]

At the risk of going OT, the Sextets have been part of my core listening since I encountered them on a Music from Marlboro lp. Somehow the Quintets have slipped under my radar, relatively speaking. The sextets seem almost Symphonic in their breadth, with the Quintets having more of a Chamber Music feel.
Brahms was one of the editors when the music of Schubert was being prepared into performing editions, and I wonder if he was ever tempted to write a Quintet featuring 2 Cellos or one with Double Bass and Piano

Worth remembering that the Sextets are relatively early works, when Brahms' style was more excitable and adventurous, very innovative around the classical forms yet often in conflict with a desire to remain faithful to them. (This is why Glenn Gould was critical of the D Minor Piano Concerto, resenting Brahms' recap of the 2nd group in (i)). The 1st Symphony, 20 years in the making, plays out the psychodrama in the Shadow of Beethoven.

The Sextets are a part of that earlier impassioned and urgently youthful inspiration, from the Serenades, the 1st Piano Concerto, the Piano Quartets and the 1st String Quartet etc. But the Quintets are more reflective and considered in their expressions, part of the late style including the Clarinet Sonatas and Trios, the great late statement of the Clarinet Quintet. Intimations of Immortality - and of Mortality.

Having said that, the middle-movement of Op.88 is unusual in its 5-part arch-like structure - like a slow movement containing two scherzos (ABACA), reminding one of Schumann's typical Scherzo-with-two trios.
Brahms had many original takes on what might be a slow movement or scherzo - those deceptively light intermezzos and graziosos in the symphonies, the easy naming disguising the hinted depths (the lyrical lightness cutting so intensely to the heart; no surprise that the 3rd Symphony is often played as if it has two slow movements), the contrast with weighty, powerful finales (all remarkably innovative formally themselves).

But the Op.88 stands out as the 5 sections of the Grave ed appassionato-Allegretto Vivace-Tempo1-Presto-Tempo1 are so very separated, with no real transitions between them. Later, Rachmaninov showed a predilection for a related scherzo/slow movement combination, e.g. in the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies.
But, usually very integrated into a larger-scale cyclic structure.

[Serial_Apologist]

And yet - did not Schoenberg call him 'Brahms the Progressive'?

Typically, as one who always insisted that his music belonged in an historical continuum, Schoenberg, rather than breaking from the past, looked back to what in earlier composers he regarded as awaiting fruition in his own music and that of his radicallest disciples. In Brahms's case it would have been less advances in the harmonic/expressive realm than in the integration of once compartmentalised formal divisions specific to music of the sonata-type into seamless wholes. Launching germinal subject materials into variations even before full exposure, cross-referencing, deriving from and expanding materials throughout a work, diminution of distinction between the vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (contrapuntal), and so on, could be seen as possibilities held back by diatonic-centred anchorage, only attaining full fruition in the 12-tone method of composition.

If it were not for Brahms and Dvorak, we would have a lot less excellent chamber music from the second half of the 19th century.

I would place Fauré's chamber works at the same level as those of Brahms, and arguably superior to Dvorak's.

[jayne lee wilson]

Fauré has a far narrower formal and emotional range than Brahms; he's following his own very personal path, and very beautifully and originally too. But Brahms felt his almost overwhelming duty to the inheritance of the great classical tradition, and found a remarkably wide-ranging yet individual response to it. You see this clearly in his "early, middle and late" musical styles.

I don't think he was held back in any way by "diatonic-centred anchorage" (I'd be surprised if Schoenberg really believed that). There is much chromatic writing in his music of course, which contributes to his huge achievement in almost every classical form. But above all, his (re)invention of new sonata- and other classical-based structures against the background of such formal conventions, produced an endless flow of exciting and impassioned results, both formal and expressive.
Think of the way the 2nd Symphony builds the whole first movement from the first three notes, extending and elaborating sonata-structure in a way not far from Bruckner; or the faux-repeat of the 4(i), its finale-like giocoso-scherzo, the Passacaglia Finale. In all of this his researches into earlier music had a huge influence on his own creations as well.

So I suspect "Brahms the Progressive" was at least as much an acknowledgement of what Brahms achieved on his own large terms, as any recognition of his future-historical implications.

[rauschwerk]

For many years the only recording I had was the Berlin Octet on the Philips Brahms Chamber box. Surprisingly no longer available.

I, too, had only that recording until I realised that the Berliners didn't really get the hang of the gypsy-influenced finale of Op 111. Now I have the Nash Ensemble and the Raphael Ensemble. I don't yet know either well enough to express a preference, though the Nash's recorded sound is a little more airy, which I do prefer.