1 CD - SK 68 252 - (p) 1996

VIVARTE - 60 CD Collection Vol. 2 - CD 7





String Sextets
69' 41"



Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)


String Sextet No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 18
33' 25"
- Allegro ma non troppo
 13' 14"
1
- Andante ma moderato
 8' 12"
2
- Scherzo. Allegro molto - Trio. Animato 2' 56"
3
- Rondo. Poco allegretto e grazioso 9' 03"
4
String Sextet No. 2 in G major, Op. 36
34' 07"

- Allegro non troppo 12' 52"
5
- Scherzo. Allegro non troppo - (Trio). Presto giocoso 6' 07"
6
- Adagio
 8' 44"
7
- Poco allegro 8' 24"
8



 
L'Archibudelli
- Vera Beths, violin (Antonio Stradivari, Cremona, 1727)
- Marilyn McDonald, violin (Andrea Guarnieri, Cremona, 1670)
- Jürgen Kussmaul, viola (William Forster, London, 1785)
- Guus Jeukendrup, viola (Max Möller, Amsterdam, 1947)
- Anner Bylsma, cello (Gianfranco Pressenda, Turin, 1835)
- Kenneth Slowik, cello (Carlo antonio Testore, Milan, c.1750)
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
Lutheran Church, Haarlem (The Netherlands) - 9/12 June 1995

Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Producer / Recording supervisor
Wolf Erichson

Recording Engineer / Editing
Markus Heiland (Tritonus)

Prima Edizione LP
-

Prima Edizione CD
Sony / Vivarte - SK 68 252 - (1 CD) - durata 69' 41" - (p) 1996 - DDD

Cover Art
Garten mit Sonnnenblumen by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) - Vienna, Österreichische Galerie im Belvédère

Note
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The string sextet as a genre offers many splendid sonorities, adding tenor (viola II) and bass (cello II) voices to the richness of the string quartet. Yet this form has attracted surprisingly few composers. Although the sextets of Dvorak, Gade, Raff, Schoenberg, Spohr, Strauss and Tchaikovsky have become cornerstones of the chamber repertoire, none has won such widespread approbation as that awarded the two sextets of Johannes Brahms, Opp. 18 and 36.
Much has been made of the fact that Brahms's sextets predate his three surviving string quartets, the first two of which make up Op. 51, as if he had been hesitant to challenge the acknowledged masters of the string quartet on their own territory. Attention has also been directed to certain similarities between the sextets and the two bucolic orchestral Serenades, Opp. 11 and 16. While there are certainly parallels to be drawn, in the final analysis the two sextets inhabit their own world distinct not only from the Serenades, but also from Spohr's equally eloquent Op. 140 sextet of 1848. Brahms was probably acquainted with it through his violinist friend Joseph Joachim. Spohr's sextet, the only one of the above-cited sextets composed before the Op. 18, might well have suggested the genre to Brahms.
“However, if you don't like the piece,
then by all means send it back to me.”
In a letter written in November 1859 to Clara Schumann announcing completion of the second Serenade, Brahms refers to a string septet on which he has embarked. But, by September of the following year, Brahms sent “the finished sextet” to Joachim with a rather typically self-deprecatory note: “I'm afraid that as I've tarried so long over the piece, your expectations will not have been raised! But since God makes all things possible, I am sending you the parts,in case the Rondo should strike your fancy. If you don't have any particular remarks to make, and if it pleases you, then let Deierberg copy them out, charging it to my account. I look forward to being invited soon to a rehearsal. However, if you don't like the piece, then by all means send it back to me.” Joachim kept the work, and premièred it in October 1860, but not before making a number of useful suggestions that Brahms incorporated into the final version, including assigning the opening statement of the first movemerit's theme to the first cello rather than to the first violin. (The frequency with which soaring melodies are entrusted to the cello throughout the two sextets recalls not only Brahms's predilection for that instrument, already evident in the opening of the Op. 8 Piano Trio, but also the similar writing in Schubert's C major Quintet, which, despite its slightly leaner scoring, may well be their true spiritual progenitor.)
The Sextet in B flat major, Op. 18, frequently called the most accessible of Brahms's chamber works, is, like the Serenades, of markedly “Classical” design but exhibits as well many of its creator`s compositional preoccupations. The first movement's lyricism and the Ländler-like dance rhythms of several of its themes are patently Schubertian, while the third movement brings to mind the Haydnesque Scherzo of the Op. 11 Serenade. In the finale, folksong elements enliven the Classical rondo form. The slow-movement variations rely heavily on Baroque models, with several clear references to two of Brahms's favorite variation sets, Bach's D minor Chaconne for solo violin and Beethovein's C minor Variations for piano, Wo0 80.
“Free but happy”
Like Op. 18, the Sextet in G major, Op. 36, may also be considered retrospective, though for entirely different reasons. In the summer of 1858 Brahms was invited to Göttingen by his fellow composer Julius Otto Grimm. There he met the young soprano Agathe von Siebold, whose “magical“ voice Joachim compared to the sound of an Amati violin. The relationship developed over a two-month period of regular contact, and continued through letters, now lost, described by Agathe as “sources of the deepest and purest joy,” to the point that, by early 1859, some declaration from Brahms was expected. (The engagement ring seen on Brahms`s hand in a photo taken at Göttingen during this period was never publicly acknowledged.) Pressed by Grimm and others, Brahms wrote to his “Gathe” in a letter she quoted in her menioirs: “I love you! I must see you again! But I cannot wear fetters. Write to me whether I am to come back, to take you in my arms, to kiss you and tell you that I love you.” Stung by Brahms's view of their love as burdensome (she perhaps did not take seriously enough his motto “Frei aber froh” - free but happy), she sent him in return a letter of refusal. As a result, the two never met again, and each felt the wound of the severance for some time to come. It was ten years before Agathe eventually married, and only when she was an old woman could she bring herself to reply to the greeting Brahms sent her through Joachim. The composer, for his part, though he occasionally flirted in later life, consciously suppressed his feelings whenever he felt them in danger of getting out of hand, confessing that he had “some cause to fear the gentle sex.”
For Brahms, release came during the composition of the G major sextet (1864/5), wherein, he told the singer Josef Gänsbacher, “I have freed myself from my last love.” The reference would have been clear to anyone who, like Brahms and the Schumanns, relished musical ciphers, for Agathe's name is invoked three times at the lyrical climax of the first movement's second subject (D is substituted for the otherwise unavailable T; in German, B natural is H).
The G major Sextet was first published in April 1866, and later that same year received its public première on October 11 in Boston, Massachusetts, with a Zurich performance following in mid-November.
“In the brightness of morning”
Notes on the recording
The instruments used here are equipped with gut strings, as they would have been in Brahms's time, rather than with the steel, or nylon-and-steel, strings almost ubiquitous today Although the gradual acceptance of steel strings began in the early years of our century, the title of Siegfried Eberhardt's 1938 Recovery or Ruin of the Art of Violin Playing (The Steel String, Enemy of Art) makes it clear that the transition was not accomplished without a struggle. Steel strings were both more reliable and much less expensive than their gut counterparts,but, as Anton Mingotti's 1949 study The Law of Movement in the Playing of String Instruments concluded: “There is no doubt that the tone of the gut string, correctly played, is superior in every way to that of the steel string, and that the extraordinary effect which was peculiar to perfect violin playing has greatly deteriorated with the use of the steel string. [...] The argument, frequently used, that a prominent yiolinist will get outstanding results on steel strings is not cogent; one can refute it by saying that the effect would still be substantially enhanced if he used gut strings.”
Just as instruments have changed since Brahms`s lime, so too have our perceptions of his music. In particular, the sextets are frequently performed in an effusively sentimental manner. In preparing the present recording, we chose instead to rely on the description provided by the influential Viennese music critic Max Kalbeck, a strong partisan and personal friend of the composer's, whose multi-volume biography has served as a cornerstone for all subsequent Brahms scholarship: “[In the Sextet Op.18,] the noclurnal atmosphere and nighttime magic of the Serenades is transformed into the mood of an early summer morning. No Romantic fog hangs over the sextet, and no shimmering moonlight obliterates its contours. No, it is as clear as a brightly lit day, when the sun, mirrored in the diamond dew drops of a thousand flowers, illuminates every nook and cranny with its happiest beams. The melodies sound as if they were being sung by a healthy, well-rested voice, as if they breathed the refreshing early morning air of a promising young life. Goethe's Ganymed, an extremely musical poem, proclaims (insofar as the poet`s words can approach the musicianis ecstasy) much the same bliss: “How you glow upon me, in the brightness of morning, all around me, O Spring, my lover!”
In 1865, Brahms himself described the second sextet as possessing “the same jovial character" as the first. By 1929, however, the renowned English writer on music Sir Donald Tovey was lauding the lìrst sextet for its “pervading Olympian calm, asserted in the opening and maintained throughout at a height which annihilates the distinction between Classical and Romantic, and which is as far above formality as it is above more tempting foolishness,” while calling the second “the most ethereal of all Brahms's larger works.”
It is Kalbeck's vision, rather than Tovey's, that we seek to realize.
© 1996 Kenneth Slowik