There are dozens of recordings of Brahms symphonies out there, made by top-notch, full-strength orchestras. Why on earth would you choose to listen to them played by a piano quartet? Good reasons are offered by this new recording from the Notos Quartett. A new arrangement by Andreas N Tarkmann, made especially for this ensemble, makes the Symphony No 3 sound as much of a bona-fide chamber work as the Piano Quartet No 1, Op 25, which gets a fine performance alongside it.
The recording’s subtitle is a bit of a red herring, given that it refers to a piece they don’t actually play: Schoenberg’s orchestral arrangement of Op 25, perhaps the most famous example of Brahms being adapted in the other direction, from chamber work to orchestral extravaganza. Schoenberg said he made his version because he was irritated by loud pianists who obscured the string detail: “I wanted to hear everything at once,” he declared, “and this I have achieved.” Not everyone has ears like Schoenberg, though, nor does every piano quartet have the sense of balance that the Notos players and their recording engineers are working with here.
When people describe Brahms’s music in terms of colour they often reach for rich browns: mahogany, chocolate. It’s what you get from squeezing all the primary-coloured paints out and mixing them together. Thanks partly to the exactitude and delicacy of the playing, Tarkmann’s arrangement feels as though it somehow unmixes the brown so we can hear those lighter, brighter original colours for themselves – not what you might expect given that Tarkmann is working with a vastly reduced range of sonorities, but that’s the effect. It loses one kind of richness and gains another.
The second movement has a simplicity and directness, the third a sense of compactness that feels absolutely right. The sweeping second theme of the finale perhaps loses some of its excitement in this version, but almost everywhere else there’s an irresistible feeling of propulsion that comes from being able to hear each musical line work itself through from beginning to end.
None of this would work were the players not so unanimous in the way they shape the music and so impeccable in their blend and tuning – this is superb chamber music playing. If you love Brahms’s chamber music, here’s a brand new example. As for the symphonies, it might change the way you listen.
