"Brahms, a splendid pianist, had a special diffidence regarding chamber music for strings alone. He fussed endlessly with the string quartet medium and said in later years that he had written twenty before producing one good enough to publish – and at that, he published only three. He was forty by the time he allowed the first two to see the light of day, and they had occupied him for some eight years.
Perhaps Beethoven’s shadow, of which he was acutely conscious, loomed too heavily in this area. Brahms felt less hesitant writing for a medium Beethoven had never touched: he turned out two string sextets in his late twenties and early thirties.

All this puts a special focus on the two String Quintets. By the time Brahms wrote them (Op. 88 in 1882 and Op. 111 in 1890) he was at the peak of his powers. Whatever internal dilemmas he had faced had been successfully resolved, and also he had learned that a string quintet with two cellos – so memorably employed by Schubert – was not to his liking. But Brahms was always partial to dark coloring, and it seems natural that he would be strongly drawn to the dark-hued viola quintet."

— Excerpt from the original liner notes from ARC1-4849 by Shirley Fleming