I love this late work of Brahms a great deal. All the more so after buying this CD. I downloaded a good PDF file of the original edition of the score to be able to read.
It is available for download at the following URL:
This work, with its melancholy but radiant beauty, has provided one of the prime experiences of my recent listening life. It has, to put it bluntly, provided me with a great opportunity to seek comfort in music at a very difficult time of my life.
Like most discs from Glossa the disc is not merely a great recording but features a beautiful use of product design and art direction.
I love its use of a depersonalised detail of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a vision of a spiritualised slightly unreal landscape, a place of luminous transparency: the space evoked by Friedrich is very close to that created by Brahms in his late works, open, translucent even but not untroubled and often deeply melancholy.
In this quintet there is an implicit spatialisation of the musical materials. Clarinet, a solo voice of wide range in pitch and timbre set against a more or less homogenous body of strings. The moment to moment interaction and dialogue of the two bodies of sound is one of the main glories of the work itself, beautifully realised by Hoeprich and his partners.
Unusually this is a performance of clarinet quintets by Mozart and Brahms on reconstructions of instruments of the period: in the case of the Mozart, the so-called "bassett clarinet" with a chalumeau register significantly lower than the present day clarinet and in the case of the Brahms a reconstruction of the boxwood instrument used by Richard Muhlfield accompanied by the classical-period instruments of the London Haydn Quartet.
The sound itself is radiantly beautiful, the acoustic space around the instruments present without being fuzzy or ill-defined. This is playing of luminous transparency and delicate, ambiguous expression. At the opening of the Brahms quintet I love the way the two violins double one another in vibrato and bowing style so that they appear to the ear as one instrument.
The ensemble's sense of timing and phrasing, its "ensemble" to be precise, is exemplary in clarifying the texture and making the most intricate, microscopic details of the music speak to the listener: this is grandly communicative playing but which never gets in the way of the essential simplicity of the music.
I would have liked to have introduced it to my mother but she is gone now and so this review is dedicated to her memory.
After the String Quintet Opus 111 Brahms had intended to give up composition but his hearing of the clarinet playing of a Mr Muhlfield, whom he nicknamed "Fraulein Klarinette", inspired a Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, 2 Sonatas for clarinet and piano and this Quintet for clarinet and string quartet.
Given Brahms' painstaking compositional process and his self-critical nature this late flowering of chamber music with clarinet is almost miraculous: obviously inspired, the works seem to write themselves and were finished at great speed.
As usual with Brahms the Trio has a classical precedent in the so-called "Kegelstatt" Trio K498 of Mozart and there is the so-called "Gassenhauer" Trio Opus 11 by Beethoven for the same forces whilst the precedent for the Quintet is obviously the great Quintet KV581 by Mozart.
Let's start then with the 1st movement, a complex Allegro with what seems like a profusion of different motifs but which are all related to one another in accordance with what Schoenberg recognised as a principle of "developing variation".
Brahms begins with the most innocuous of subjects, involving a turn, for two violins, which steal in almost conspiratorially, as if in a whisper, out of which eventually flowers a clarinet-coloured melody, encompassing all the phrases so far laid out.
Brahms excels here at finding a musical texture which corresponds and responds to the formal sequence of musical ideas: the essence of this music is not in the material substance it flagrantly exposes but in the spaces opened up by the structure of the music itself, the spaces literally "between" the notes themselves.
This recording above all others seems to possess, to me, the ability to make visible those structural connections and repetitions - those seeming-recapitulations or repetitions, embodied in heterophonic, polyphonic, homophonic, variation or rondo forms at a large-scale formal level.
Here the structural relations outlined in the intricate polyphony of 5 equally important lines and made themselves manifest, materially, right there and then: in this recording one appears to hear only the music "playing itself". For me the tempi, the modes of articulation, the colours produced themselves, their timing and emphasis seem just about perfect.
Coming after the sunny open sonority of the Mozart Quintet that precedes it on disc, the richness and depth of sound produced by the 5 mutually conversing and consequential lines in the intricate filigree counterpoint of the Brahms is a beautiful transformation, I believe totally consciously on the part of the composer, of the sound-world of the earlier work. It goes without saying that I think the combination of the two works a particularly beautiful one.
(as usual this is to be continued)
(as usual this is to be continued)
