midnight Archive

BRAHMS: Piano Trios – Vienna Piano Trio – MD&G; BRAHMS: Rhapsodies; Piano Sonata 3; Ballade – Mortensen, p. – LAWO

by Audiophile Audition | Nov 9, 2016 | SACD & Other Hi-Res Reviews

BRAHMS: Piano Trios No. 1 – Trio Op. 8  (Version of 1889); Trio Op. 87 ‒ Vienna Piano Trio ‒ MD&G multichannel SACD MDG 942 1962-6 (& 2+2+2); 63:31 (7/8/16) ***1/2: “In Finstrer Mitternach” = BRAHMS: Two Rhapsodies, Op. 74; Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 5; Ballade, Op. 10, No. 1 ‒ Nils Anders Mortensen, p. ‒ LAWO multichannel SACD LWC1084; 58:00 (2/6/16) [Distr. by Naxos] ****: Brahms at midnight and mid-afternoon. I decided to review these recordings together because they started me thinking about the fractious (mostly on one side of the equation) relationship between Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Thanks to Nicolas Slonimsky’s endlessly entertaining Lexicon of Musical Invective, we know that Tchaikovsky was not a fan of Brahms. In a diary entry from 1886, Tchaikovsky noted that he was playing some music by Brahms. His reaction? “What a giftless bastard!” Tchaikovsky did moderate his view when he met Brahms two years later in Leipzig, at the home of violinist Adolph Brodsky. Here, the Russian composer found Brahms a dignified, kindly man and generally had more complementary things to say about his German rival. However, auditing a run-through of Brahms’s new trio—presumably the Trio No. 3, Op. 101—Tchaikovsky was moved […]