
piano quintet, op. 34 horn trio, op. 40
JOHN BROWNING, piano members of the orchestra of st. luke’s
piano quintet, op. 34 horn trio, op. 40
JOHN BROWNING, piano members of the orchestra of st. luke’s
Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34
[1] I. Allegro non troppo
[2] II. Andante, un poco adagio
[3] 111. Scherzo. Allegro
[4] IV. Finale: Poco sostenuto -- Allegro non troppo
Horn Trio in E-Flat, Op. 40
[5] I. Andante
[6] II. Scherzo. Allegro
[7] III. Adagio mesto
[8] IV. Finale: Allegro con brio
John Browning, piano
Members of the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble
Members of the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble
Krista Bennion Feeney, violin I (and Horn Trio)
Mayuki Fukuhara, violin II
Louise Schulman, viola
Daire Fitzgerald, violoncello
Jospeh Anderer, french horn
Brahms, for all his imagination, skill, musical fluency, and sheer genius, was a most tentative composer. It is alleged that he destroyed more than half of his chamber-music output. He waited until his 40th year to publish his first string quartet. We don't know how many destroyed quartets were its forerunners. We do know, however, that he tackled that most sacred of musical forms only after having written his miraculous Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8, his brilliant series of piano quartets (Opp. 25, 26 and 60), and his hauntingly beautiful sextets (Opp. 18 and 36). When it came to quartet writing, Brahms was bedeviled by the ghosts of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He felt unworthy of those three great exemplars of musical perfection, and entered their exclusive turf only after he felt reasonably secure in his own musical prowess.
The same holds true for his symphonies. How dare he, a mere mortal, presume to write in a form that the great Beethoven had brought to such Olympian heights? Brahms' first symphony was more than 20 years in the making, and he was 43-years old at its completion. Its numerous false starts became subsumed into other works. The most famous being an otherworldly sarabande that ended up as the second section of his Ein Deutsches Requiem, "Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras.”
Even after having produced a critically acclaimed work, Brahms was often plagued by second thoughts. The version of his 1854 Op. 8 trio that is usually played today was extensively pruned and revised by Brahms during his twilight years.
The Quintet in F Minor for Piano and Strings, Op. 34, thought by many to be his towering masterpiece in the realm of chamber music, was originally scored, in 1862, as a string quintet. Brahms' mentor, Joseph Joachim, praised the work highly, but remarked that the string writing was difficult and problematical. Brahms took his
criticism to heart and rescored the piece as a sonata for two pianos. That version was performed in 1864, but with little success. Clara Schumann, who knew the piece in its stringquintet incarnation, and who studied and performed its two-piano version, offered Brahms this telling critique:
"The work is splendid, but it cannot be called a sonata. Rather it is a work so full of ideas that it requires an orchestra for its interpretation. Those ideas are for the most part lost on the piano; they are only to be recognized by a musician and do not exist for the general public. The first time I tried the work I had the feeling that it was an arrangement, but thinking I might be prejudiced, I kept quiet. But [Hermann] Levi was quite decided about it. So please remodel it once more!"
Brahms took her advice. He largely preserved the first piano part of the two-piano version, but recast the second piano part for a string-quartet ensemble. The result is one of the most heroic, lyrical, sonically sumptuous and musically satisfying of his chamber works.
The first movement opens with a brooding unison statement, bereft of harmony, and uttered quietly and portentously by the piano and strings. Merely four bars in length, it heralds a musical drama of epic proportions. Everything that follows flows logically, naturally and effortlessly from that statement. The movement's lyrical moments are infused with Romantic melancholy -- not the nascent Romanticism of Robert Schumann, but a Romanticism already diluted by a touch of cynicism. This is yearning unfulfilled and almost, but not quite, hidden behind a decidedly stiff upper lip. Throughout this movement, Brahms takes the audience on an emotional rollercoaster ride, relentless in its hairpin turns - its alternate evocations of ecstasy, despair and resignation. It is also a textbook - clear example
of classical sonata-allegro form -- almost merciless in its logical rigor and sheer concision. Though its emotional content may have us convinced that we have been listening to a largescale movement of Schubertian heavenly length, Brahms pulls off that utterly Brahmsian illusion in a mere 300 bars!
The second movement, Andante, un poco adagio, is one of those all-too-brief and all-tootelling Brahms intermezzos -- a moment of decompression after the rigors of the first movement, but one infused with a piquant, wholly Brahmsian melancholy.
The following Scherzo is one of Brahms' most original conceptions -- an odd but totally convincing mixture of martial heroics, mysticism and consoling tenderness. This is not a dramatic scherzo a la Beethoven, or one of Bruckner's pounding, primordial evocations, but quintessential Brahms that steadfastly defies categorization.
Finales are always problematical. Beethoven was a master at painting himself into a corner, and then escaping, in his last movement, via a totally surprising stroke of genius. Schubert largely sidestepped the issue by making the first movements of his major works carry most of their emotional baggage, and then, movement by movement, relieving the pressure until closing the piece with a lightweight moto-perpetuo dance -- a dance, however, that could sometimes become sardonic as in the finale of his Death and the Maiden quartet.
Brahms' solution was to open his finale with a brief but ominous introduction followed by an almost folklike tune abstrusely related to the opening of the first movement. What ensues is another epic drama, full of sound and fury and signifying everything, but with longer moments of repose than are found in the first movement. The
result is a most satisfying capstone to one of Brahms' most satisfying chamber works.
Hermann Levi was an ardent Brahms admirer. He was also Wagner's choice as conductor for some of that master 's greatest and most unBrahmsian operas. After hearing the Quintet in F Minor in its final incarnation, Levi wrote the composer: "The quintet is beautiful beyond words ... You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece of chamber music, the likes of which we have not seen since the year 1828:' His allusion was to the last year of Schubert's life, in which he composed his incomparable C Major Quintet.
The circumstances surrounding the creation of Brahms' unique Horn Trio (Horn, Violin and Piano) in E Flat are quite different from those of his Op. 34. This piece was written in one unproblematically jump and with no after-thefact misgivings. 1n 1866, Brahms found a wonderful wooded spot above Baden-Baden. He was so enthralled by its beauty that he actually showed a close friend the very spot that inspired the opening theme of his horn trio -- a highly unusual thing for the usually reticent Brahms to do. The work that ensued is one of the greatest oddities in the Brahms canon. Its first movement is not in sonata-allegro form; indeed, its subsequent movements seldom break free of their home keys. This is harmonically static music, most unusual for Brahms. But here Brahms was writing for the natural horn, an instrument that was then being supplanted by the valved horn with its infinite harmonic flexibility. The problem was that Brahms didn't like the sound of that newfangled valved horn. Like Bach before him, he found tempered pitch wonderful in its ability to allow a composer to modulate freely between the keys, but less than ideal in its ability to realize the pitches in any given key. He chose to write for the archaic nonvalved horn, much as Mozart had done in his
series of horn concertos, and that's what accounts for the odd harmonic structure of this work.
What emerges is a piece that is as paradoxical as its composer - at once sophisticated and naive, unerringly calculated and spontaneous. It is, in the end, a bucolic meditation and celebration -the closest that Brahms ever came to writing a pastoral symphony.
John Browning
The title page of Brahms ' Op. 34 calls the work Piano Quintet in F Minor. Brahms clearly intends the piano to have the lead role in that work. Likewise, in the Horn Trio in E Flat, Op. 40, the piano carries the responsibility for fleshing out the harmonies. 1n each case, the piano is critical, and demands a player who is at once a prescient musical analyst and a true Romantic.
John Browning, ( b. Denver, May 22, 1933), is renowned for his exceptional interpretive skills, brilliant technique and deep commitment to musicianship. Browning has made more than 20 European concert tours and has performed repeatedly with such orchestras as the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, London Philharmonic, London Symphony and Scottish
National Symphony. He has toured the former Soviet Union on four occasions, and has concertized in Japan, South America and Africa. In the United States, Browning appears regularly with the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
He has long been an eloquent champion of the music of Samuel Barber. Barber 's Pulitzer Prizewinning Concerto for Piano and Orchestra had been written especially for Browning, who gave its world-premiere performance at Lincoln Center in 1962. Browning 's subsequent recordings of ·the work with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, and, more recently, with the St. Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin, are landmarks in the history of American music. His 1993 MusicMasters recording of the complete Barber solo piano repertoire earned him his second Grammy • Award for Best Classical Instrumental Soloist Without Orchestra. He has also distinguished himself as a Prokofieff interpreter par excellence, recording, back in the 1960s, the whole canon of Prokofieff’s piano concertos.
--WilliamZagorski