BRAHMS Piano Quartets Nos. 1–3
Primrose Piano Quartet
MERIDIAN 84650/1–2 (2 CDs: 123:47)
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New classical music releases reviewed in detail by Gavin Dixon
Wednesday, 10 April 2019
Brahms Piano Quartets Primrose Quartet
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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.
This review appears in Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6.
This review appears in Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6.
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