THE STRAD
“Not an ounce of spare fat on Brahms in transformative period performances. …countless details emerging that often lie hidden beneath a haze of sonic opulence.”
Julian Haylock – Full review
BBC RADIO 3 RECORD REVIEW
“…three excellent performances of the Brahms’ piano quartets…I’ve enjoyed them a great deal.” Andrew McGregor (see full review below)
CLASSICAL SORCE ★★★★★
“performances unlike any others of Brahms’s Piano Quartets that have come my way… They feature piano-playing of the highest class, on interesting instruments, and string-playing that does justice to the music. They will happily sit on your shelves as alternatives to your favourite high-powered, modern-instrument versions.” Tully Potter
MUSICAL OPINION ★★★★★
“This new set is much more than passing interest and in may ways goes to the top of the recommended list – not least for the intriguing and very successful decision to record these three masterpieces using three different pianos of the period.
But that, at heart, is a superficial view: these performances are manifestly born of deep acquaintance with the music – in no way can they be regarded as mere “play-throughs” of the “rehearse-record” approach of less committed artists: time and agin one senses the depth of understanding of these players, caught in recordings of quality and depth of balance. It is a life-enhancing pleasure to renew acquaintance with these imperishable masterpieces in this way, and one must give this issue the highest recommendation.” Robert Matthew-Walker
THE ARTS DESK
“This is a thrilling, volatile performance. An impressive achievement, the scholarship audibly enhancing the performances without dominating them. Impressive engineering, too.” Graham Rickson
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
“The performers draw out the vivid characters of the music, often to a splendid degree.” Jessica Duchen
FANFARE
“studiously academic ….vibrantly musical collection” Gavin Dixon
MIDLANDS MUSIC REVIEWS ★★★★
“Clarity and historical accuracy are admirable but the PPQ also deliver lithe, crisp and enjoyable performances as well….tempestuous and exciting. Excellent recorded sound too.”Norman Stinchcombe
CLASSICAL MUSIC DAILY
“… the playing is meticulous and the overall effect magnificent.” Patrick Maxwell
AMERICAN BRAHMS SOCIETY
“These spacious and transparent readings incorporate the conventions of period performance style in unusually fresh and expressive ways. Especially noteworthy is the sense of spontaneity that comes from a willingness to abandon modern fussiness about fastidious ensemble playing and to embrace a sometimes breath-taking elasticity of tempo and generosity of gesture.” William Horne
IN FULL
BBC Radio 3 Record Review, Andrew McGregor, 9th March 2019.
“ Now here’s a recording of the three Brahms Piano Quartets with a difference. It’s from the Primrose Piano Quartet. They’ve done as much as they can to make their performances as historically informed as possible, researching manuscripts and editions, listening to the earliest recordings from the 1920’s, right through to their choice of instruments and the string players’ use of a mix of gut and metal-wound strings, limited vibrato, some expressive slides as well, and pianist John Thwaites plays three different instruments of the kind Brahms would have known. The difference it makes is immediately obvious in the first chords of the C minor Quartet Op. 60.
The first movement of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor Op. 60 played by the Primrose Quartet: violinist Susanne Stanzeleit; viola player Dorothea Vogel; cellist Andrew Fuller and pianist John Thwaites, who’s playing three different period pianos for these performances from a Viennese collection. You just heard the sound of a piano by Friedrich Ehrbar, the most modern Viennese piano in the 1870’s. When Brahms performed the piano duet version of his fourth symphony he played one of these very instruments in the company’s Ehrbar Concert Hall in Vienna, which is where this new recording was made.
They’ve made every effort they can to recapture as much of the sound Brahms would have had in his ears and once you’ve dialed in the different balance between the instruments and the individual sounds of the three period pianos you realise that you’re also listening to three excellent performances of the Brahms Quartets. I’ve enjoyed them a great deal. You’ll find them on two CDs from the Meridian Label and you get excellent informative notes by John Thwaites as part of the package. That’s not the last fine chamber music you’ll hear this morning…”
classicalsource.com – Tully Potter
*****
“Brahms’s three Piano Quartets are not exactly terra incognita, but this Meridian set has some special claims on our attention: several editions of the music have been consulted, the string-intruments are strung with gut, as they would have been in Brahms’s day, and John Thwaites uses three period pianos from the Gert Hecher Collection in Vienna – in opus number order, a Streicher, a Blüthner and an Ehrbar.
Reading the booklet notes, including an essay on the music and various historical matters by Thwaites, I would like to be able to nod sagely and say, for instance: “Ah yes, the Ehrbar … so much better than a modern piano for this music.” But what I know about vintage pianos you could put in your eye, and I am not sure I could tell these three instruments apart in a blindfold test. What I do appreciate is that their mechanism does sometimes work in the music’s favour – I recall, for instance, that Rudolf Serkin always used to insist on having a piano with a genuine una corda pedal for these works.
Before undertaking the recordings, the players held a four-day symposium during February 2018 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – which provided funds for the project – with half-a-dozen experts. The latest thinking on historical performance practice, as related to Brahms’s chamber music, was discussed and the Primrose Piano Quartet used an 1850s Wilhelm Wieck piano, having previously had access to an 1890s’ Blüthner in Hampshire and an Erard from the former Finchcocks Collection. All of this means that Thwaites had to accustom and adjust himself to six different pianos. Even taking into account that pianists do this kind of thing on a regular basis, one has to feel for him. But perhaps this is the place to say that his playing on this releases is magisterial. There is a long line of British Brahms pianists stretching back a good century and a quarter: one thinks of Tovey, Walker, Bauer, Hobday, Hess, Borwick (a broken link in the chain because he died young leaving no records), Davies, Keys, Solomon, Curzon, Smith, Lill… (In his note, Thwaites writes admiringly of another, Olive Bloom, who recorded the C-minor Piano Quartet with members of the Spencer Dyke Quartet for the NGS in 1927.) Just on the evidence of his playing here, Thwaites deserves to join their number.
The musicians begin with the C-minor Quartet, which originated in the mid-1850s with the other two but was held back while Brahms revised it and was not published until 1875. A number of commentators have speculated that the work was intimately bound up with Brahms’s feelings for Clara Schumann, and have noted her name spelt out in German notation (in a transposed version of Robert Schumann’s Clara motif). Despite all the talk of historic pianos, it is the string tone that catches the ear, the unmistakable timbre of gut which lends a mellowness to the sound. The Ehrbar piano, which also has a mellow sonority, adds to this impression, making a nice thunk with each of its first two chords; and the acoustic plays its part – it is pleasantly resonant but perhaps confines the upper frequencies a little.The tutti sound has a sort of nutty quality and the heroic moments still emerge sounding heroic – it is all a matter of scale. The gut strings impose their own parameters but make lovely tones: rather than the beautifully groomed string sound we have been led to expect from modern groups, this is something a little grainier. I could wish the viola had a more individual, more plangent tone. The musicians catch the troubled air of the Scherzo and the cello solo in the Andante flows pleasingly: this movement can easily get too slow. The Finale evolves naturally, working up considerable power.
I had already noted a degree of flexibility of tempo in the Allegro of the G-minor Quartet (the one Schoenberg orchestrated) when I read in the notes that it was intentional. The two main themes are strongly delineated, one against the other, and there is no attempt to impose a more-or-less even pulse on the movement. The ‘Intermezzo’ has a pleasant lilt, with delightful muted string sonority and beautifully delicate playing from Thwaites. The musicians adopt a fine flowing tempo for the hymn-like melody in the Andante con moto and the various sections follow their own inner logic. In the ‘Rondo alla Zingarese’, Thwaites is up against such names as Serkin, Gilels and Ax but does not turn a hair, producing some very fine playing. The grand episodes have their grandeur, the players slow down quite a lot for the lyrical episodes, the strings employ some splendid portamento and the piano cadenza is terrific.
In the A-major Quartet (recently scored by Kenneth Woods, link below), the piano is fully involved from the start and there is a good feeling of give and take. A lot of the Allegro non troppo is in Brahms’s heroic vein but there are also quieter moments and the players observe a good range of dynamics. They keep the Poco adagio, with its muted strings, on the move, maintaining its lyrical impulse until the big outburst by the piano, which is very different from the similar effect in the slow movement of Schubert’s A-major Piano Sonata (D959) and is easily assimilated. In the piano’s figuration in this movement you hear the clarity that Thwaites mentions in connection with the Blüthner. The quieter mood returns and finally the big string theme takes over, before the quiet ending – how rich this Poco adagio is, justifying Daniel Gregory Mason’s statement that it is Brahms’s finest chamber music movement so far. The Scherzo has a questioning quality, well expressed here, and reverses the usual order of things, in that the Trio is more heroic than its surrounds – Thwaites rises to the demands of this Trio and he and his colleagues manage its dancing second theme very well, playing its quiet coda atmospherically as they hand over to the return of the Scherzo, which ends tempestuously. The Finale has a Hungarian fringe, mixing the valiant and the lyrical, and in Thwaites’s hands the Blüthner produces quite a bell-like sonority at times as the players move towards the quiet passage that presages the strong ending. This is a long work, almost fifty minutes, but the musicians’ concentration never flags.
To sum up, these performances are unlike any others of Brahms’s Piano Quartets that have come my way. If they are not quite in the league of the Busch-Serkin interpretations of the first two, my benchmarks for those particular works, they exude an air of friendship which is attractive. They feature piano-playing of the highest class, on interesting instruments, and string-playing that does justice to the music. They will happily sit on your shelves as alternatives to your favourite high-powered, modern-instrument versions.”
Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6 and Classical CD Reviews, Gavin Dixon
“Period instrument recordings are often accused, or at least suspected, of academic rather than musical motivations. But the two need not be mutually exclusive, as this studiously academic but also vibrantly musical collection demonstrates. The three Brahms piano quartets are here presented in period performances—the first ever it seems for Nos. 2 and 3—using three different pianos of the era, and recorded in a venue familiar to Brahms himself, the Ehrbar Saal in Vienna. The recording grew out of a symposium at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on period performance practice. The Conservatoire also sponsored the release, and so, as expected, the documentation is impeccable, with detailed discussion on the works, the performance philosophy, and the pianos, by John Thwaites, who is the Quartet’s pianist, and Gerd Hecher.
The three pianos are an 1870 Streicher (Quartet No. 1), an 1853 Blüthner (No. 2), and an 1878 Ehrbar (No. 3). Of the three, only the Ehrbar is cross-strung, and it sounds the most modern. The Blüthner is the most wooly sounding, while the Streicher has a nimble action and clear tone that makes it the most attractive and distinctive, at least to my ear. But soft, round sounds are the order of the day, and the gut strings of the other three players—Susanne Stanzeleit, violin; Dorothea Vogel, viola; Andrew Fuller, cello—give an ensemble sound that is fully sympathetic to each piano in turn. The gut strings are particularly apparent in Brahms’s regular use of percussive pizzicato patterns, here given a warm bronzed quality, but without reducing the rhythmic drive.
The liner note discusses, as a potential source for performance practice, a recording of the Third Quartet made in 1927 by the Spencer Dyke Quartet for the National Geographic Society. It comes up early on in a discussion about editions: The Simrock leaves the sustain pedal down indefinitely after the opening piano octaves, while Hans Gál’s later Breitkopf and Härtel edition releases the pedal at bars 2 and 4, apparently in line with performance practice in Vienna at that time, 1926–7. In fact, this new recording follows Gál, where the Spencer Dyke goes along with Simrock. The moral seems to be, as John Thwaites writes, “… to generalise too much about the Performance Practice of Brahms’s day is to miss one of the most essential characteristics of that time – its plurality and variety.”
Another contentious issue is portamento, in which the Spencer Dyke Quartet are apparently indulgent. The First Piano Quartet appeared on a period performance recording in 2016, from the Australian ensemble Ironwood (ABC 481 4686). They take portamento to extremes, and the results are uncomfortably queezy, whatever the historical veracity. The Primrose Quartet apply portamento too, but it’s more reserved, as Thwaites writes, “… an unashamedly modern players’ perspective on the refined portamenti of Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1881 (and rumoured to be an earlier owner of Susanne Stanzeleit’s Guadagnini violin).” Piano arpeggiation—a subject of much discussion in 19th-century period practice—is rare on the NGS recording, as it is here. More interestingly, the parts occasionally move out of alignment in that early recording, a practice that the Primrose Quartet aims to follow. So we often hear a piano chord slightly before the sustained bloom of the string trio, but the effect is made more palatable by the generally mellow attack from each of the pianos.
The Ehrbar Saal gives a warm resonance to the sound, and perhaps more body to the pianos than they might otherwise achieve. In line with its scholarly credentials, the recording is made in what is described as “Natural Sound.” It isn’t clear exactly what that means—some sort of binaural approach perhaps?—but the result is a marked separation of the string trio in the stereo array, with the cello dominating the right speaker. The pianos are well recorded though, without any of the mechanics impinging on the sound.”
