Brahms - Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor, Op.25

Johannes Brahms (7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897)
Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor, Op.25

Fauré Quartet (piano quartet): Dirk Mommertz (piano), Erika Geldsetzer (violin), Sascha Frömbling (viola) and Konstantin Heidrich (cello)

0:11 - I. Allegro
12:53 - II. Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo – Trio: Animato
20:16 - III. Andante con moto
29:55 - IV. Rondo alla Zingarese: Presto

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer are such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. An uncompromising perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.

Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Embedded within his meticulous structures, however, are deeply romantic motifs.

In 1861, Brahms completed his first piano quartet which mixed reviews by friends and critics alike, but has remained alive in the concert world. Throughout the 20th century, its popularity continued to grow as the listening public came to recognize Brahms as perhaps the quintessential master of Romantic chamber music. His first quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello harkens back to the music of Schubert, one of Brahms' favorite composers, as well as forward with inventiveness that inspired composers in the next century, especially Schoenberg. While his contemporaries were writing music that was an obvious break with the past, particularly Wagner, Brahms wrote in the old forms, which hung together with a pleasing and deceptive looseness, as did the works of Schubert. Scratching the surface of this piano quartet reveals that the themes and textures do not hang together loosely at all. Everything is built out of thematic material, which is without precedent in chamber music. It is the kernel of what Schoenberg described as "developing variation" and prepares the way for atonality, which coheres only when all the material is in reference to itself. The G minor quartet is pure clarity in a way that did not exist before Brahms. This was also the first chamber work of Brahms' that he played in public.

The first movement of the G minor quartet has the sweetness of heroic themes in repose, but it also simmers, at least in a good performance. In bad renditions of this work, the tension is ignored in favor of an empty niceness, which is certainly to be avoided. The second movement, an Intermezzo, is introspective and full of musical inquiry among the strings. Themes spread out searching for something, with a beautiful and mysterious effect. The Andante third movement has a dreamy grandness, which is normally an effect reserved for orchestral forces. The Hungarian, Rondo finale is pure fire, blasting through rousing themes with a concerted vigor.

Many generations after the work's inception, it has withstood the public's initial reservations. It should also be pointed out that other influential musicians thought it was pure genius. One great violinist regarded it as proof that Brahms was Beethoven's musical heir. There were many such reactions.

Schoenberg liked it enough to orchestrate it. He gave his reasons for doing so as follows:

1. "I like the piece."
2. "It is seldom played."
3. "It is always played very badly; the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted to hear everything...."

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms
https://www.allmusic.com/composition/piano-quartet-no-1-in-g-minor-op-25-mc0002384873

Project files:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bz6Cn_cB9KcZ_QFauDnBd-AVdqUuXLYS

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