Recorded at St. George’s, Brandon Hill, 21-24 May 2007, these elegant Brahms performances manage to elucidate the darker, more turbulent emotions of the composer while maintaining a sense of intimacy rare in Brahms chamber music inscriptions. Stephen Hough certainly can claim his share of virtuoso prowess, yet one senses in this rendition of the F Minor Quintet a thorough submersion of his extroverted pianism to the will of the ensemble. While the influence of Schubert–especially the C Major Quintet– permeates most of the piece, Brahms stamps his own resolute drama into the figures, often hinting at the emotional rushes in Beethoven’s F Minor Piano Sonata, Appassionata. We feel the turgid ebb and flow of powerful impulses, the development and recapitulation fused together by a taut momentum that becomes obsessive on the note C. Schubert’s song Pause provides the matter for the A-flat Major Andante, and here Hough’s piano invokes the melancholy song infused with his own personality. The C Minor Scherzo maintains its Bismarckian onrush of energies, but it, too, never exceeds a poised restraint that marks the entire concept. The chromatic finale clusters around motifs from Schubert’s Grand Duo Sonata, exploiting all but one note of the chromatic scale, almost in anticipation of Schoenberg. Liquid and fiery at once, the interchanges between Hough and the polished Takacs create a Brahms moment noteworthy for its uniformly subdued passion and homogeneity of expression.
The same somber hues mark the A Minor Quartet (1854; rev. 1873), another Takacs revelation of implosive intensity. Melancholy and fraught with the F-A-E anagram associated with Joseph Joachim, the music gains from viola triplets courtesy of the poetic figurations of Geraldine Walther. The long swells from cellist Andras Fejer prove no less affecting; the second subject, moreover, provides through inversion the basis of the ensuing Andante moderato. The most affecting moment may well be the Menuetto, which combines the antiquarian impulse in Brahms with his predilection to synthesize slow and quick movements in one form. The Takacs adds an air of mystery to the proceedings, their moments of polyphony allowing the two lower strings to articulate lucidly against Edward Dusinberre’s sweetly plastic violin line. Metric tensions urge the final movement forward, the syncopations and hemiola figurations becoming at times unnerving and whimsical, all the while insisting on a martial sensibility. Songful and expressive, the entire album bespeaks an ensemble in happy rapport with a musical idiom with which they have come to grips without mannerism.
— Gary Lemco
