Brahms: The Piano Quartets, Opp. 25, 26 & 60

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Description of Brahms: The Piano Quartets, Opp. 25, 26 & 60

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

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