Further Details

Title: Brahms: The Piano Quartets, Opp. 25, 26 & 60
Condition: New
Format: CD
EAN: 0074644584622
Genre: Classical
Release Date: 1990
Description: EDITORIAL REVIEWS
AMAZON
The piano quartet--one of music's many curious misnomers--relies on a particularly subtle interplay between its contrasting textures of strings and keyboard. The synergy of the four musicians on this CD (each a star on his respective instrument), as in their account of the Mozart piano quartets, creates a shared dynamic that brings the expressive depths that Brahms positively poured into this idiom. They've managed to develop a style of breathing together with a kind of lucidly organic inevitability.

The first quartet (in G minor) exhales Brahms's empathetic engagement with the chamber music of Schubert (the piece marked his Viennese debut) but would have a profound impact on Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote a notable essay on it extolling "Brahms the progressive" and later scored it for full orchestra. There's a similarly Schubertian leisureliness to the Quartet in A, but in these musicians' hands, its length unfolds as a horn of plenty, fertile in its musical invention, with an especially magical lushness in the romantic "Nachtstück" slow movement. But the real emotional centerpiece here is the C Minor Quartet (also known as the Werther Quartet from its purported inspiration in Goethe's novel). Ax, Stern, Laredo, and Ma bring a concentrated power and broiling originality to their account, instilling its moments of anguish and harmonic dislocation with searingly tragic energy. The Andante in particular emerges as a sustained rhapsody as the musicians play off each other's phrasing to build a statement of majestic eloquence. --Thomas May
No Of Discs: 2
Artist: Yo-Yo Ma
Record Label: Sony Classical
Release Year: 1990

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