brahms string quartets
(plus Brahms' INTERMEZZO, transcribed for string quartet by Zakarias Grafilo — newly recorded June/July 2020)
ALEXANDER STRING QUARTET
FCL 2022
InfoDad's Top Rating
“The subtlety and mutuality of purpose with which the members of the Alexander String Quartet approach Brahms’ three quartets are almost a perfect example of the conversational form of music-making of which string quartets have been exemplars since Haydn’s time. This ensemble’s sheer tonal quality is the first thing a listener will notice: there is purity, warmth, richness and elegance throughout. And there is precision, too: many quartets rely on vibrato to produce a larger, warmer sound, but the Alexander String Quartet is remarkably restrained in this regard, its vibrato as carefully controlled as its ensemble passages are tightly bound. This works exceptionally well in Brahms. ...these performers manage to make both the singing elements and the double-stopping clear through a sense of mutuality that approaches sleight of hand. Indeed, the third string quartet, which in some ways is the lightest of the three despite the considerable compositional elegance of the final Poco Allegretto con Variazoni, comes across with such pleasure and apparently casual playfulness here that it is easy to see why this work in B-flat was Brahms’ favorite of his three quartets. [...]
As an encore for this two-CD set, there is an interesting quartet setting of the late piano Intermezzo in A, created by the Alexander String Quartet’s first violinist, Zakarias Grafilo. The arrangement emphasizes the gentle tenderness of this little lullaby, and the fact that the recording ends with this Andante teneramente piece rather than something more virtuosic and intense shows clearly the sensitivity and care with which this ensemble’s members approach all the repertoire heard here.”
— InfoDad.com (Nov. 24, 2021), FCL 2022 Brahms String Quartets (Full review)
"...a stunning achievement"
“This recording...is the next-to-last to feature Paul Yarbrough—who had been with the group 40 years—on viola. In fact, he has already officially left the quartet, but will return one more time to record the Mozart Viola Quintets. […]
It’s been quite a ride for the Alexander Quartet. From the first time I heard them, roughly 16 years ago, I was convinced that they were the premiere American string quartet and one of the best in the world. […]
They play Brahms the way they played Beethoven, with brisk tempi and sharp attacks, which gives the music a much more exciting profile, and of course they still have that incredible tonal sheen that sets them apart from everyone else. Whatever their secret, the ASQ has the most sheerly beautiful sound of any string quartet I’ve ever heard, and it’s not because they use a lot of string vibrato. On the contrary, all four players have an even, tight vibrato, and although they occasionally use portamento it is not broad or mannered. […]
One wonders why Alexander waited so long to record these works; perhaps they wanted to be sure that their interpretations matched the mental image that each player had of them, to make the recordings a lasting monument to their interpretations. If so, they made the right decision. There is not a note or phrase in the entire series that does not sound right in terms of musical structure. […]
By any standard...this set is a stunning achievement of brilliant playing, gorgeous string sound, and exciting, dynamic interpretations. Really, not to be missed.”
— Lynn René Bayley, The Art Music Lounge (Oct. 15, 2021), FCL 2022 Brahms String Quartets (Full review)
Liner notes by Eric Bromberger
In one of the most candid admissions in the history of music, Brahms lamented to conductor Hermann Levi about the strain of having to compose within the shadow of Beethoven: “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.” This comment is usually taken to refer to the overpowering example of Beethoven’s symphonies, but Brahms was just as haunted by the prospect of composing string quartets, and in that form he had to confront not one, but a number of giants from the past. Brahms was all too aware of the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and he knew that any quartet he wrote would be judged against the achievement of those four masters.
It was not a case of Brahms being uninterested in writing quartets. On the contrary, he struggled for many years to write a quartet that he felt was worth publishing. As a twenty-year-old, he had appeared on the doorstep of Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf with the manuscript of a Quartet in B Minor, which Schumann wanted him to publish. But even as a young man Brahms was the most self-critical of composers, and he suppressed this quartet (the manuscript has vanished). Brahms said that over the next two decades he wrote and destroyed at least twenty more quartets. Eventually he sketched two that he liked well enough to preserve, and in Switzerland during the summer of 1866 he played one of them — in C minor — on
the piano to Clara Schumann. But Brahms was still not satisfied, and he set them aside for seven more years while he composed the Alto Rhapsody, Schicksalslied, Triumphlied, and the Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Finally, during the summer of 1873, which he spent in the village of Tutzing near Munich, Brahms completed the two quartets he would publish as his Opus 51 — he said that they had been “written for a second time” during this final revision. He heard both quartets performed privately before their official premieres that fall, and after those premieres he continued to refine them for publication. When Brahms’ first two quartets were finally published, he was 40 years old.
An important difference between Brahms and those four earlier masters of the string quartet — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert — was that all four of them were string players who performed quartets frequently. All four had learned to play the violin as boys, though Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert preferred the viola when playing quartets; they came to the string quartet from the “inside” — by playing them. Brahms did not play a stringed instrument, and he came to the string quartet as an “outsider.” He had never played quartets and so had not experienced as a performer some of the elements that make it so fertile and flexible a form: the equality of the four voices, the give-and-take between the players, the pairing and contrasting of different instruments, the many different kinds of sonority possible from a quartet. One need not be a string player to write great quartets (as Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, and Shostakovich have shown us), but there are moments in Brahms’ quartets when we feel that he is writing incredibly powerful and focused music first — and only secondarily that it should be played by a string quartet. This is not meant in any way to denigrate Brahms’ achievement in his three quartets — they are superb compositions by one of the greatest of composers — but it is to note that Brahms’ approach to the quartet differed from that of the Viennese masters of several generations earlier.
String Quartet in C Minor, Opus 51, No. 1
Faced with the heritage of those earlier Viennese masters, Brahms made his first effort in the form a very serious one indeed. The Quartet in C Minor is marked by extraordinary concentration. The mood of this quartet is dark: Brahms sets it in C minor, the key Beethoven reserved for his most dramatic works, and he drives the music forward with an almost implacable logic. Virtually the entire quartet is unified around a central musical idea — the rising, dotted figure heard in the first violin at the very beginning. This theme saturates the opening Allegro and much of the rest of the quartet — as theme, as accompaniment, as rhythm. A rigorous development and an extremely dramatic coda drive to a quiet close as that seminal theme collapses into silence.
Brahms marks the second movement Romanze, which suggests music of a lyric or gentle nature…and this movement alternates two ideas which, in the aftermath of the first movement, do seem gentle; even these, however, are marked by emotional restraint. The dotted motif of the first movement becomes the slow accompaniment at the beginning here, and over it Brahms presents the first theme, marked espressivo. The second idea — marked dolce and built on halting triplets — is somewhat darker. Brahms alternates and varies these two theme-groups.
The concentration that marks Brahms’ thinking in this music is clear at the beginning of the Allegretto, where he presents two themes simultaneously: the first violin’s chain of sixteenths (an inversion of the quartet’s opening motif?) pulses steadily above the viola’s wistful tune. The trio section brings the quartet’s one moment of sunshine — Brahms switches to F major as the first violin sings a little waltz-tune. Beneath that, the second violin alternates A’s on open and closed strings; the shifting colors of the resulting “wow-wow-wow” make an effective accompaniment to the waltz. A da capo repeat concludes the movement.
The finale brings back the concentration — and the furies — of the first movement. This movement’s opening figure is derived almost literally from the quartet’s initial motif, and the more relaxed second subject is in fact a slow variant of that same shape. In sonata form, this movement is built on the contrast between these two themes, already so much alike. In these same years, Brahms was working on his First Symphony, which moves from a stormy beginning in C minor to a triumphant conclusion in C major. Brahms allows himself no such release at the end of his first official string quartet: he remains firmly in C minor, and the powerful cadence re-invokes — one last time — the thematic motif that has saturated the work.
String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 51, No. 2
After his long delay in writing a symphony, Brahms wrote a stormy and impassioned first symphony in C minor, then quickly followed it with a lyric and expansive second. The situation is somewhat similar with the string quartets: the dark Quartet in C Minor was followed by the more relaxed Quartet in A Minor. It was as if Brahms’ opening work in a form needed to be a clenched confrontation in which he could attack the form and make it his own, and only then could he relax and write a sunnier work in the same form.
That said, however, it must be noted that Quartet in A Minor is marked by the same concentration of materials and motivic development that animated its predecessor, and much of this quartet grows directly out of the first violin’s opening theme. Brahms intended this quartet for his friend Joseph Joachim, and he incorporated Joachim’s personal motto “Frei aber einsam” (“Free but lonely”) in the notes F-A-E that shape the opening theme. In addition, the three rising eighth-notes that appear innocently in the fourth measure of this theme will return in various forms here and in subsequent movements. But the quartet is not an exercise in crabbed motivic manipulation, and Brahms supplies a second subject that simply glows: it is a long duet for the violins, and he marks it dolce (“sweet”), lusingando (“charming, coaxing”), and mezza voce (“half voice”). From these contrasted materials, he builds an extended sonata-form movement that concludes on evocations of Joachim’s motto. The Andante moderato takes the shape of its main theme from that innocent figure heard at the very beginning. Most striking here is the duet of first violin and cello at the center: over buzzing tremolos from the middle voices they sing a “Hungarian duet” in close canon before the movement closes on a return of the opening material.
In the third movement, Brahms bends traditional minuet form for his own purposes. He calls this movement a “quasi-minuet”: rather than building it on the standard minuet-and-trio form, Brahms presents a lilting, ghostly minuet, then contrasts it with two sections — marked Allegretto vivace — where the music suddenly flashes ahead on a steady patter of sixteenth-
notes, only to rein back to resume the more stately minuet tempo.
Many have heard the influence of Hungarian music in the finale: the first violin’s vigorous, strongly inflected dance at the very beginning seems to have its origins in gypsy fiddling. And perhaps this “gypsy fiddling” in a quartet intended for Joseph Joachim is a nod to that violinist’s Hungarian background. This movement is in sonata-rondo form: that “gypsy” theme, full of energy and snap, recurs throughout but subtly evolves on each return. Brahms speeds this wild dance to its close on a Più vivace coda.
String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 67
Brahms’ final quartet is his most original essay in that form. He completed this quartet and several other works during the summer of 1875, which he spent happily at Ziegelhausen, near Heidelberg. Throughout that relaxed summer, though, Brahms continued to work on his First Symphony, a project that had occupied (some would say obsessed) him for over twenty years. He could at least escape into the other works he wrote that summer, and typically he deprecated them as “useless trifles, to avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony.” The Quartet in B-flat Major — hardly a useless trifle — had its first performance in Berlin on October 30, 1876, five days before the long-awaited premiere of the First Symphony in Karlsruhe.
Brahms’ first two string quartets had been tightly argued affairs, but the Third shows a sense of play absent from his two earlier efforts, and this music flows and shimmers. Its bright surface, though, conceals many original touches, and the genial finale in particular is a compositional tour de force. Brahms gives the opening movement the unusual marking Vivace, more typical of a scherzo than a sonata-form first movement. It is built on two contrasted theme-groups, but in fact the real contrast in this movement is between two quite different meters. The opening — inevitably compared to hunting horn calls — is in 6/8, while the second theme is in 2/4: its slightly square rhythms have reminded some of a polka. Brahms builds the movement around subtle contrasts between these different meters, jumping back and forth between them and at several points experimenting with some modest polyrhythmic overlapping. The movement concludes with a cadence derived from the “hunting-horn” opening.
The ternary-form second movement opens with a long violin melody reminiscent of the music of Schumann. Brahms marks the violin part cantabile, but it must cut through a thick accompaniment, which is often double-stopped. The middle section, full of fierce declarations and rhythmic swirls, gradually gives way to the opening material and quiet close. The third movement is marked Agitato, but that is more an indication of mood than tempo, and Brahms puts the real tempo direction — Allegretto non troppo — in parentheses. Particularly remarkable here is the sound: Brahms mutes all instruments except the viola, which dominates this movement. Its husky, surging opening idea contrasts with the silky, rustling sound of the muted accompanying voices.
The trio section likewise emphasizes the sound of the viola, followed by a da capo repeat and coda.
The finale — Poco Allegretto con Variazioni is the most remarkable of the four movements, and Brahms’ biographer Karl Geiringer called it “the nucleus of the whole work.” As Brahms’ marking suggests, it is a set of variations, based on a folk-like tune announced immediately. There follow six variations, all fairly closely derived from the opening tune, and then some remarkable things begin to happen. Into the seventh variation suddenly pops the hunting-horn tune from the quartet’s very beginning, the eighth variation is based on a transition passage from the first movement, and in the closing moments Brahms puts on a real show of compositional mastery: he combines the hunting-horn tune from the very beginning with the variation melody of the finale and presents them simultaneously.
Such a description makes this music sound terribly learned, and that might in fact be the case, were it not so much fun. We greet these themes as old friends when they appear to take up their place in the dance, and Brahms rounds off the quartet with this bright union of his opening and closing movements.
The Quartet in B-flat Major was Brahms’ favorite among his quartets, but with it he appears to have exhausted his interest in the form. He would live another twenty-four years and publish more than fifty further opus numbers, but he never wrote another string quartet.
Intermezzo in A Major, Opus 118, No. 2
(trans. Z. Grafilo)
Late in life, Brahms wrote twenty brief piano pieces. They distill a lifetime of experience and technical refinement into very concise spans, and in their sometimes bleak way they offer some of Brahms’ most personal and moving music. Someone once astutely noted that a cold wind blows through these late piano pieces, and Brahms himself described them as “lullabies of my pain.” The Intermezzo in A Major in fact is a lullaby (Brahms’ marking is Andante teneramente: “tenderly”), and that gentle mood prevails throughout. The Intermezzo is heard on this recording in an arrangement for string quartet by Zak Grafilo, first violinist of the Alexander String Quartet.
MORE BRAHMS:
Brahms & Mozart Clarinet Quintets
Brahms String Quintets and Sextets
Brahms & Schumann Piano Quintets
In Friendship
The Brahms Project
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TRACK LISTING
DISC 1
String Quartet in C Minor, Opus 51, No. 1
1. Allegro
2. Romanze. Poco adagio
3. Allegretto molto moderato
e comodo
4. Allegro
String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 51 No. 2
5. Allegro non troppo
6. Andante moderato
7. Quasi Minuetto, moderato
8. Finale. Allegro non assai
DISC 2
String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat Major, Op. 67
1. Vivace
2. Andante
3. Agitato (Allegretto non troppo)
4. Poco Allegretto con Variazioni
Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118 No. 2 (tr. Grafilo)
5. Andante teneramente
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