Starring The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Solveig Kringelborn, Swedish Radio Choir.

Lydia Artymiw Plays Brahms

BRAHMS: QUARTET 2 SCHUMANN:

Classical Music

Here is a recently discovered passionate and expressive live recording by the then 52 year-old German master, Adolf Busch, who made very few concerto recordings, conducted by his old school mate, William Steinberg. The coupling is a fine live performance of the Clarinet Quintet from a Town Hall concert in New York, at which Reginald Kell made his U.S. debut. The technical reconstruction was done by Maggi Payne and the liner notes are by Tully Potter.

Claudio Boh�rquez has established himself as an experienced chamber musician and concert soloist. For the past 30 years he has been playing the cello, teaching at the famous Hanns Eisler conservatoire in Berlin and travelling the world. Now the moment has come for him to attend to his discography. "The time is right," as he says. He learned early on, from colleagues he trusted and admired, how important it was to take one's time. No snap decisions - musical ideas needed to mature, interpretations had to be based on personal experience, and self-awareness was essential. He begins where he first started. The Sonatas for piano and cello opp. 38 & 99 by Johannes Brahms loom large in the life of each and every cellist. Like others before and since, he tackled these works at an early age. In the Hungarian pianist P�ter Nagy, he has found the perfect musical partner. Brahms was especially fond of the cello: we know that from the countless themes, leading lines and heartfelt melodies that the composer entrusted to the instrument. In his youth, he had "played the fiddle a bit, but my instrument was the cello," as Brahms told the Viennese music critic Herberger. The Hungarian Dances, serving as a foil - almost as an encore - to the two sonatas, were written at a time when Hungarian refugees were settling in Brahms's native city of Hamburg. The demand from the aspiring middle classes for sophisticated but playable music, suitable for domestic performance, was one of the secrets of success for the Hungarian Dances. The arrangement by Alfredo Piatti is the currently preferred version for piano and cello. The musical starting signal has rung out. Claudio Boh�rquez is not stopping at Brahms, he has much more to give us.

Fabian M�ller was given Brahms's complete piano works on an album as a child, and he would sit in the back of his parents' car on the way to vacation, enraptured by the music of the Hamburg composer. Nothing has changed in his attitude since then. Fabian M�ller has embarked on a promising career which has already been full of thrills and continues to progress very favorably. In 2017 he was the first German pianist in this millennium to win a second prize at the ARD Music Competition as well as being awarded both the Audience and Busch prizes. He gave his debut at New York's Carnegie Hall in the spring of 2018, and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in September that year. The Bonn-born pianist demonstrates Brahms's calm, introverted pianistic approach in his recordings of the Ballades op. 10, the Piano Pieces op. 76 and the Intermezzi op. 117. This is an unusual choice for such a young artist: M�ller's playing style eschews sensational pianistic virtuosity, instead evincing heartfelt musicality, especially in the soft tones. In "piano expert" Stefan Kn�pfer, who is known from the film Pianomania, he has found the perfect technical partner, who knew exactly how to react to his ideas and wishes. The result is a sound that is almost inimitable. On his debut album for Berlin Classics he can be heard inviting listeners to totally immerse themselves in the music. "This is music that I wish to hear when I am old and perhaps ailing, because despite their sadness they emit such warmth and comfort, characteristics that I have found in no other composer."

DRESDEN-GANZ GROßE OPER(SPECIA

•With her live recording of the opulent Elgar concerto at the beginning of last year, Catherine Manoukian demonstrated how she lends a lean, precise and yet emotional character to the Romantic repertoire. That same quality is fully evident in her new recording of the three Brahms Sonatas: together with her Norwegian accompanist, Gunilla Süssmann, she presents a reading of Brahms whose seemingly restrained surface is barely able to conceal a rich inner emotional world. This is particularly appropriate in the three violin sonatas: the composer, normally a very reserved man in his private life, here quotes songs of his own that provide some insight into biographical context. The nicknames sometimes given to the sonatas, of "Regenlied", "Thun" and "Symphonic", give a hint at their inspirations and reveal how Brahms uses the intimate framework of chamber music, expanding it and taking it to the instrument's technical limits. This recording succeeds in making this audible at the highest level of intensity while always maintaining the fabric of the motifs and the formal structure: here is a modern, lean reading that nevertheless does not lack emotion and depth.

Brahms LoveSongs

Apart from his high-profile concert activities, Franz Konwitschny was inseparably associated with the foundation and development of the new Eterna label. Between 1959 and 1961 Eterna issued all Beethoven’s and Schumann’s symphonies in the then innovative stereo format. Like all of Konwitschny’s late recordings, these gramophone records are now sought-after collector’s items that offer interpretations of lasting significance. One such notable document of the great maestro is the present recording of Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony, made in June 1962 only weeks before Konwitschny’s death. The producer of this recording, Dieter-Gerhardt Worm, praises “the coherence and euphony of the interpretation. Konwitschny does nothing subjectively, he interprets the work. When I played Konwitschny the recording in hospital before his last concert tour, tears of joy rolled down his face.” Worm, who worked on most of Konwitschny’s recordings as a young production manager for the Eterna label, remembers the focused studio work and the immense artistic importance of the conductor: “As a conductor, he was always one of the greatest for me. What he did as a Bruckner conductor, for instance, was incredible. Konwitschny was more than a musician to whom one could say anything; he was someone who knew instinctively how to apply what he had learnt and integrate it into his conducting gestures.”

BRAHMS, J.: Violin Concerto / TCHAIKOVSKY, P.I.: Symphony No

BRAHMS Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79. 7 Fantasien, Op. 116. 4 Klavierstücke, Op. 119 • Alexander Kobrin (pn) • QUARTZ 2077 (54: 39) Live: Lied Center, Kansas City and Glinka Museum, Moscow


Alexander Kobrin is the Van Cliburn prizewinner whose recording of Haydn sonatas I praise below. Here he is playing Brahms live in concerts recorded in Kansas City and Moscow. Born in 1980, he must be a confident man. He’s certainly a gifted, disciplined pianist. Perhaps inevitably, when I think of Brahms’s op. 119, I think of the Van Cliburn recording My Favorite Brahms. On the reissue Cliburn plays the two rhapsodies found here and two of the short pieces of op. 116. He ends the four pieces of the loosely connected op.119 magisterially: I don’t know another version that has Cliburn’s stirring martial quality, and yet is also true to its more romantic ruminations. Kobrin’s version is less grand, and to my mind, marginally less exciting. Of course, Brahms presents unusual problems to any interpreter: His formidable intellect is always visible behind even his most impassioned moments, as in the two rhapsodies recorded here. I find Kobrin most convincing in the gentler passages of these pieces. His tone is always beautiful, and he is free of mannerisms and irrelevant romantic gestures. His audience is wildly appreciative. If in most of the works I prefer the grander Cliburn, I won’t discount the appeal of Kobrin’s nuanced playing. There’s of course a lot of competition in late Brahms piano music, including the recordings of Perahia, Katchen, and on certain pieces, Rubinstein.


FANFARE: Michael Ullman

Brahms: Complete Trios

BRAHMS Piano Quartets Nos. 1–3 • Pro Arte Pn Qrt • QUARTZ 2105 (2 CDs: 119:03)


The current incarnation of the Pro Arte Piano Quartet was founded in 1989 by three members of the St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble—Kenneth Sillito, violin, Robert Smissen, viola, and Stephen Orton, cello—and pianist Hamish Milne; the four play in this recording, made back in 2008 and now being released for the first time. Violinist Sillito is the one member in common with the old Pro Arte, whose 1971 recording of the C-Minor Third Quartet, along with the Piano Quartet of Schumann, I reviewed in Fanfare 35:6. To add to the possible confusion, there has already been a recording of the Brahms piano quartets by another ensemble of the same name, based in Bucharest, for the Arte Nova label. The original Pro Arte Quartet, and the most famous ensemble to bear the name, was a string quartet founded in Belgium in 1912; it recorded the Brahms G-Minor First Piano Quartet with Arthur Rubinstein in 1932, and has been in continuous existence ever since, serving since 1941 as artists-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Finally, there is another string quartet by the same name currently based in Salzburg!


So much for the name; what of the music-making? For the most part it’s thoroughly admirable. In the G-Minor Quartet the tempos are ideal, the musicians are consistently responsive to one another, and the balances are excellent. Pianist Milne is alternately expressive and energetic—never flamboyant—as required. This makes the G-Minor the strongest performance of the three. In the A-Major Second Quartet, which as has become customary stands alone on the second disc, the tempos are not so unerringly judged: The first movement seems to go on autopilot, while the second seems hurried and lacking in the sense of mystery that dominates its middle section. The finale is downright headlong.


The first movement of the C-Minor Quartet is rock-solid, but its introverted moments are less lyrical than those of Tamás Vásáry and colleagues on DG; similarly, the second movement scherzo is less hell-bent, the third movement cello song less meltingly beautiful. Violinist Sillito still plays awfully well, but perhaps not quite as sweetly as he once did. The recording is terrific. In short, these are very high-level performances, but ultimately do not supplant the versions by Vásáry et al., Domus (on Virgin), or the Fauré Quartet (in Nos. 1 and 3, also on DG). Call it an honorable mention.


FANFARE: Richard A. Kaplan