BRAHMS Piano Quartet No. 2, op. 26
(orch. Woods)
Kenneth
Woods, cond; English SO
NIMBUS 6364 (49:14)
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New classical music releases reviewed in detail by Gavin Dixon
Wednesday, 15 August 2018
Brahms Piano Quartet No. 2 Woods English Symphony Orchestra
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Kenneth Woods writes that his first impulse for
orchestrating the Brahms Second Piano Quartet came from coaching a chamber
music course in the work and finding himself asking the players to imagine the
opening as a quartet of hunting horns. His orchestral rendering makes a good
case for this association, although most of the music that follows is more
abstract. But Woods always keeps Brahms’s orchestra in mind, and the result is
a version of the work that, with a few minor exceptions, could easily be mistaken
for an arrangement by Brahms himself. Woods evidently has a keen understanding
both of the quartet and of Brahms’s orchestral practice, but he also
demonstrates an impressive discipline in keeping this large-scale music within
the Classically proportioned orchestral framework that Brahms would have
favored.
The orchestra employed is that of the Brahms First and
Third Symphonies, so there is no percussion beyond timpani and no tuba, but
there is a discreetly employed contrabassoon, and the string section sounds
large enough to afford the music symphonic scope. Woods makes particularly
idiomatic use of the woodwinds and horns. String statements are often followed
by woodwind refrains, where the combination of bassoon bass line and flute
melody sounds particularly Brahmsian. So too does the interplay of solo horn
and clarinet in the second movement. Listening for deviations from Brahms’s
orchestral technique quickly seems futile, as it only brings up the smallest
details: an occasional uniformity in the tutti textures and an anachronistic
reliance on the lower end of the trombone tessitura. It is also tempting to
speculate how Brahms might have adapted the movement endings for orchestral
performance. Woods remains faithful to the brief codas of the outer movements,
but Brahms himself would no doubt have expanded these into something more
fitting to the scale.
Comparisons with the Schoenberg orchestration of the
First Quartet are inevitable, but they only serve to demonstrate the different
artistic aims of the two arrangers. Where Schoenberg lays on thick orchestral
textures, rich in doublings, Woods opts instead for transparent, clear
textures, always sufficiently forceful, but never outside of the chamber-music
spirit of the music itself.
Another inevitable association is the idea that Woods
is providing a new Brahms symphony for modern audiences—and we could argue that
he has already done so with his revelatory recordings of the Hans Gál
symphonies. But the Second Quartet is early Brahms, stylistically distinct from
the symphonies proper. So we are not dealing with Brahms’s Fifth Symphony here
so much as his Third Serenade.
The performance, by the English Symphony Orchestra
under Woods himself, is excellent. Woods writes that his first obstacle in
making the arrangement was the high register required of the horns to play the
work in A. The horn quartet is certainly stretched, but their ensemble and tone
are rarely compromised. The string section also shows impressive discipline and
stamina in the long melodic lines, and the balance and color within the
woodwind section fully justifies Woods’s regular recourse to their solos and
ensembles. Woods is as disciplined in his tempos as he is in his orchestration,
maintaining brisk chamber music tempos in the outer movements, but affording
some welcome breadth in the Adagio. The
recording, made at Wyastone Concert Hall, is clear and bright. The back of the
orchestra seems a little distant, although this has the surreptitious advantage
of bringing a sense of distance and perspective to the evocative horn calls at
the start.
This review appears in Fanfare magazine issue 42:2.
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