Karl Leister and the Brandis Quartet amble through Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet as if they’ve spent a lifetime in each other’s company, and as members of the Berlin Philharmonic they have. Their pooled tone is warm and generous, their phrasing unhurried and Nimbus’s sound quality is appropriately intimate. The sessions were held in the Teldec Studio Berlin during June last year, but a few months earlier Leister had joined the Leipzig Quartet for a recording of the same work on the Dabringhaus und Grimm label. Comparing the two reveals greater liveliness, animation and expressive intensity with the Leipzig group, but a more genial spirit with the Brandis. The recordings differ too, the Leipzig sessions being more open, though no less warm, than their Nimbus counterpart. There is also an extraordinarily fine account with Charles Neidich and the Juilliard Quartet (the slow movement being especially beautiful), but it comes tethered to the three string quartets, which not everyone will want.
The String Quintet is similarly involving, with textures that verge on the orchestral and a thrilling ‘buzz’ to the highly contrapuntal finale. Available comparisons are relatively thin on the ground, the most relevant perhaps being a recent recording by the augmented Hagen Quartet, a leaner, more vividly attenuated and more transparent production, colourful in the extreme and in total contrast to the Brandis’s mature, full-bodied approach. The Hagen certainly keep Brahms on his toes, as do the Juilliard for Sony (a particular favourite of mine, and coupled with the Second Quintet), but the Nimbus record still afforded me a good deal of pleasure.
Summing up, the Brandis allow Brahms to speak for himself, whereas, ultimately, the Leipzig, Hagen and Juilliard recordings project rather more in the way of interpretative personality.'