Brahms always loved Hungary and its music-making. Hungary in its turn at once took Brahms to its heart in no small way. He's still obviously very close to the hearts of the Bartok Quartet and their colleagues. I've heard many, very many, fine performances of his chamber music for strings over the years, but none that I've enjoyed more than those (originally recorded in the earlier 1970s but never previously released in England) in this chronologically planned album listed first above. By judicious omission of certain, but not all, first-movement exposition repeats, the seven works (two sextets, three quartets and two quintets) have been fitted on to three CDs in a way necessitating only one change of disc midstream, i.e. after the first movement of the B flat Quartet. No small praise must go to Andras Szekely and Laszlo Csintalan, the recording producer and digital remasterer, respectively. The sound-quality is first class in its vibrancy, clarity and truth.
It was the total commitment of the playing that impressed me most. Every note is so ardently felt and the underlying impulse of each sustained with so sure and unbroken a sense of direction, that I felt a sense of inevitability about each performance, as if nothing could be timed, phrased or shaded in any other way. And how vividly these artists also refute the charge that Brahms had no ear for tone-colour per se. This at once transpires in the two sextets with which he made his debut in the string medium at 27 and 32 years old respectively, the one as memorable for his exploitation of the sumptuous richness to be drawn from low-voiced violas and cellos alongside two violins, as the other is for its translucency and light. I particularly enjoyed the players' super-sensitive response to the textural felicities of the variations in the Andante of the earlier work as, for instance, in the glowing violin and viola song of the fourth and the delicate intimacies of the fifth. Alongside their incandescent tonal intensity in fuller contexts (especially the leader's in his upper register) the performance leaves you in no doubt as to why this movement was once so unforgettably chosen as background music for that old French film, Les Amants.
The three quartets (for which Brahms kept the world waiting until he had turned 40) are again potently characterized and contrasted. Here, I enjoyed nothing more than the rhythmic brio and bold dynamic contrasts brought to the bucolic opening movement of the third. Scherzos and finales in their turn are allowed ample time to speak in response to Brahms's moderato, non troppo and non assai qualifications. Finally, the two quintets, emerging when he was 49 and 57 respectively. ''On every movement is written 'in the spring of 1882''' was Theodor Billroth's comment on the earlier F major work, which he compared with the Second Sextet in its radiance of spirit. This at once comes across from the players, who revel in the contrasts of deep-throated song and aerial lightness in the slow-movement-cum-Scherzo, and infuse the contrapuntal cunning of the finale with a real touch of the Dionysian. In the rich-textured first movement of the G major Quintet I was at times even reminded of Brahms's growing awareness of Wagner.
The three piano quartets of 1861, 1862 and 1886 are accommodated on the second album's two discs with a break midway through No. 2 in A. Though reproduction is again in the capable hands of Szekely and Csintalan, sound-quality here seems more of the mid- than hi-fi kind, especially that of the keyboard itself. Peter Komlos, Geza Nemeth and Karoly Botvay (leader, viola player and cellist, respectively, of the Bartok Quartet) are joined in turn by Csilla Szabo, Istvan Lantos and Sandor Falvai at the piano. I'm bound to say that in the G minor work, with its spirited alla Zingarese finale, I did not find the Hungarians either as full-hearted or as finished as Murray Perahia and members of the Amadeus Quartet in their splendidly resonant 1987 recording (CBS). But there's plenty of Hungarian paprika in the last two movements of the A major Quartet (not forgetting the stormy protest of the scherzo's Trio), and much that is both arresting and delicately sensitive in the (I thought best recorded) C minor work, inspired in the first place by the composer's early love for Clara Schumann.'