The internationally celebrated, Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet joins forces with legendary pianist Menahem Pressler of the Beaux Arts Trio for Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34, a pillar of German Romanticism that opens with one of the most recognizable melodies in classical music. Pressler, a consummate chamber artist, performs the virtuosic piano part with a clarity and transparency that makes the piano seem like a fellow member of the string ensemble. This noteworthy generation-crossing collaboration — a half-century separates the pianist, who is in his 90s, from the quartet members — yields a spacious, sweeping traversal of the Brahms Quintet that sets its own pace to build suspense and drama. While Pressler has performed the Brahms Quintet with marquee string quartets of the past 50 years, this is his first recording of it. The album offers the unusual, perhaps unprecedented, pairing of Brahms’s early Piano Quintet with a string quartet by his champion Robert Schumann, in this case, the String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 41, No.1, which the Quartet has been performing since early in its career. Dedicated to Mendelssohn, this buoyant, sprightly Romantic quartet showcases the Pacifica’s virtuosity and exuberant performance style while offering a contrast to Brahms’s moodier masterwork. This is the Quartet’s first recording of a Schumann work.

REVIEW:

Menahem Pressler was 91 when he recorded the Brahms Piano Quintet for the first time in his long and distinguished career in 2014. He’s clearly up to the task. Admittedly, tempos are slower than usual for the most part, and you won’t find the kind of dynamism and power in loud tuttis commonly served up by younger keyboard hotshots–although Pressler suddenly sheds decades in the finale’s exultant coda, matching the Pacifica Quartet’s urgent sweep note for note. There’s purpose and meaning in every phrase, every gesture, and every nuance on Pressler’s part.

Listen to the tension that the pianist generates in the soft unison rising scales prior to the first-movement exposition repeat, hear the haunting sense of mystery and flexibility in the Scherzo’s Trio, and notice how Pressler’s tonal shadings enhance the conversational lilt in the fourth movement’s main theme. Having so finely tuned and attentive an ensemble as the Pacifica Quartet on hand doesn’t hurt, of course! If the Hough/Takács and Andsnes/Artemis versions score for fluency, assurance, and grandeur, Pressler’s insights are priceless, and we’d be poorer without them.

A 2016 recording of the Schumann A minor Quartet Op. 41 No. 1 fills out the disc. The Pacifica members make a compelling case for this inspired yet arguably sprawling work. They draw out the first movement’s introduction, giving little clue about the fierce Allegro around the corner and the sharply drawn dynamic contrasts with which they’ll characterize the music.

Ferocity also defines the ensemble’s hair-trigger articulation in the “Mendelssohn on steroids” Scherzo. The Presto sounds faster than it actually transpires, due to the players’ sophisticated balancing of lines and ever-so-discreet italicizations of harmonic felicities; rarely do you hear such fusion of forward drive and contrapuntal clarity as the Pacifica Quartet delivers. It’s an absorbing performance, notwithstanding my preference for leaner and edgier versions by the Zehetmair and Eroica Quartets.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

The Hungarian dances of Johannes Brahms have always been most popular. Rarely, however, have these immortal evergreens been heard so glowing and full of life as in the performance of Guido Schiefen and Markus Kreul, who for the first time ever recorded the complete arrangement for cello and piano by the Italian cello virtuoso Alfredo Piatti on album. Along with Joseph Joachim, Piatti was one of Clara Schumann's preferred chamber music partners and thus in Johannes Brahms' closest circle. The composer must have been very satisfied with Piatti's version, since the cello adds several dimensions of the most sensitive expression to the score, which was originally written for piano four hands - only a string instrument can lament as painfully as the sixths in No. 11. Schiefen and Kreul joyfully celebrate the emotionally charged music, without ever slipping into cliché. Mischievous elegance (number 3), accentuated rhythm (number 10) and the genuinely Czarda-like juxtaposition of deeply felt melancholy and exuberant cheerfulness (number 4) characterize the music, which was partly composed according to original Hungarian melodies and partly inspired by Brahms in the style of the puszta. Through to the exuberant finale with its never-ending trills, Piatti does not exactly make the cellist's task easy. Yet his arrangement is much more than just virtuoso stuff: in close relation to the four-handed model, a genuine piece of chamber music is created, which the two performers conjure up on the dance floor in almost somnambulistic certainty.

The Dover Quartet, “the young American string quartet of the moment” (The New Yorker), launches its emerging, three-volume complete Beethoven quartet cycle with the six Opus 18 quartets, often cited as the epitome of the classical string quartet as developed by Haydn and Mozart while foreshadowing Beethoven’s future innovations. 

Bethany Beardslee is renowned as one of the great lyric sopranos of the twentieth century, and the inspiration for dozens of composers who wrote specifically for her voice. Born in Lansing, Michigan, she trained first at Michigan State College, and later at the Juilliard School. Accompanied by pianists Richard Goode and Lois Shapiro, Ms. Beardslee's performances of lieder by Brahms, Schumann and Schubert display her exquisite artistry. USC Professor of Music and Journalism Tim Page writes: "Her flexible, expressive voice, with its silvered timbre and warmly caressing middle range, was suited not only to the premieres and first American performances she sang (by composers ranging from Schoenberg to Stravinsky to Milton Babbitt) but also to the Romantic repertory." While she retired officially in 1984, she performed and recorded a number of times in the decade that followed. These recordings, from 1984 and 1986, have been remastered by Grammy award winning engineer Adam Abeshouse.