Sunday Classics: Which mainstay of the chamber music literature was first heard in 1855 in, of all places, NYC?

Violinist Isaac Stern, cellist Leonard Rose, and pianist Eugene Istomin play the first 10 minutes of the opening movement of the Brahms B major Piano Trio, Op. 8; the last 1:10 of the movement is here. We're going to have the second-movement Scherzo in the click-through. (No, the sound isn't great. I would recommend keeping the volume level moderate.)

The noble B major Trio of Johannes Brahms . . . possesses the distinction -- alone among the acknowledged masterpieces of the standard chamber repertoire -- of having been given its world premiere not in Germany, not even on the Continent, but in the benighted backwoods: the United States.

It was 1855. Franklin Pierce was in the White House, and an unknown young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln had just been defeated in the Illinois senatorial race. And that November 27 the Brahms Op. 8 was given its first performance anywhere in a Manhattan auditorium called Dodsworth's Hall, on Broadway at 11th Street -- an area which was then the nerve center of New York musical life.

-- James Lyons, editor of The American Record Guide, in his liner notes for RCA's third volume of performances by the Boston Symphony Chamber Ensemble, published in 1969

by Ken

As James Lyons is quick to point out, though, "the Op. 8 introduced in New York was not quite the Op. 8 we know," and in the click-through we're going to have his explanation and description, and we're going to hear the version of Op. 8 that would have been heard in Dodsworth's Hall in 1855 along with the revised version Brahms produced some 36 years later, which has become a mainstay of the literature.

I know we still have musical storms to deal with, carrying over from last week's Sunday Classics post, and we'll get to that. (That too is turning out to be not as simple as I had imagined.) I felt a schedule adjustment was necessary following Friday night's "flashback" post, into which I slipped what I thought was a pretty swell bonus: a complete performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, to add to the complement of recordings included in the January 8 Sunday Classics post on the quintet, from the early years of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, established during the still-underappreciated music directorship of Erich Leinsdorf. It's a terrific performance, featuring the orchestra's string principals at the time (concertmaster Joseph Silverstein, violist Burton Fine, cellist Jules Eskin, and double bassist Henry Portnoi, with "guest artist" Richard Goode, early in his distinguished career. (He would have been about 25.)

As far as I know that recording has sunk without a trace, along with all three three-LP BSCP sets RCA produced in the period 1966-68. I could hardly fail to notice that this same set included a performance of an even mightier chamber masterpiece than the Schubert quintet: Brahms's Op. 8 Piano Trio -- again with Joseph Silverstein, Jules Eskin, and Richard Goode. Not having heard it in goodness knows how long, I decided to listen to it, and as long as I was going to listen to it I might as well make digital files of it -- and as long as I was making digital files of it, I thought the least I could do was share them.

So today's subject is none other than the Brahms Op. 8 Trio, and since I'm really going to have very little to say about the piece today, I think we might as well plunge right in, which is what we're going to do in the click-through, leading off with that Boston Symphony Chamber Players performance.


TO HEAR THE TRIO, THEN HEAR IT SOME MORE,
INCLUDING THE 1854 VERSION, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics: In the piano trios and piano quartets, Brahms puts it all together

The American violinist Isaac Stern (who, as I've noted, had an uncanny affinity with Brahms), cellist Leonard Rose, and pianist Eugene Istomin, in addition to maintaining their busy solo careers and extensive teaching and other kinds of work with young musicians, found time to conertize extensively as a piano trio. Here they play the alternately driving and soulful second-movement scherzo of Brahms's First Piano Trio.

by Ken

It may be possible to play Brahms successfully without tapping into the extraordinary depth of his generosity of spirit, but it would be sort of like trying to do it blindfolded with both hands tied behind your back.

Already I feel bad for exposing this wonderful trio movement on its own, when it was designed so brilliantly to provide a change of pace from the soaringly songful opening movement of the Op. 8 Trio. By Brahms's time, not only had the scherzo (Italian for "joke") squeezed out the statelier minuet of Haydn's and Mozart's, but it was far from novel to position the scherzo second rather than third in the common four-movement layout of symphonies and chamber works. Haydn did it as early as No. 32 of his 107-odd symphonies, and even more frequently in his string quartets, especially earlier in his quartet-writing career. (By the way, he wrote scherzi rather than menuetti for all six of his Op. 33 quartets, four of them placed in the No. 2 slot, and such hardly-stately tempos markings as "allegro," "molto allegro," and "presto" became incrasingly common for his minuets.)

Obviously consideration has to be given to the overall plans of the work, though here as always you have to trust the composer's instincts. You might think, for example, that if ever a piece called for scherzo-second placement, it would be in Brahms's Second Symphony, with its gloriously rich, ruminative opening movement. Yet the composer chose to follow it with an Adagio (okay, an Adagio non molto). There's even an extreme cases where the composer himself couldn't quite work it out: Mahler's Sixth Symphony, where the composers instincts for the ordering of the middle movements, a scherzo and perhaps the most searingly beautiful conventional slow movement he ever wrote, at different times when opposite ways.

For Brahms's First Piano Trio (not quite as early a work as its Op. 8 numbering would suggest, since we normally hear it in a revision done some 45 years after the fact, a couple of years in fact after he wrote his third and last piano trio, the C minor, whose opus number is 101) it's a no-brainer, since the opening movement is one of the composer's supremely songful first movements. So the hushed, mysterious staccato murmuring of the opening of this second movement steals in as an utterly unexpected and delightful contrast to the great, expansive movement it follows. But then note the gorgeous contrast of the "trio" section at 2:13.

In the previous installments of this series, It wasn't easy being Brahms (June 28) and Could Brahms be underappreciated? (July 5), I went on a lot about the barely imaginable effort that composing cost Brahms, because of the high standard he set for himself, a standard clearly related to the deep understanding his own genius allowed him of the achievement of Beethoven. It's an unusual combination, to say the least: that degree of genius and that degree of humility.

Brahms's musical seriousness and generosity of spirit are evident most everywhere in his life. He took his musical history more seriously even than his esteemed predecessor Mendelssohn, devoting a great deal of time and effort to supporting musical scholarship and to overseeing, and personally editing reliable published editions of a slew of the great composers, and he was a great champion of younger composers and performers. (At some point we have to look at the remarkable career boost as well as the incalculable inspiration he provided for a talented Czech composer named Antonin Dvorak.)

Of course human admirableness is all, well, admirable in its way, but it doesn't by itself produce decent let alone enduring art. For that matter, neither does genius. There is, I think, more of it floating around out there than we normally reckon. The trick is that unless you figure out how to harness it, and ideally harness it for worthwhile purposes, it doesn't count for much.

Hard as the effort may have been for Brahms, this he managed to do with an eerily high success rate. And in the end, he managed to make it sound close to effortless. That is, unless, the performers get the misimpression that it's their job to open the music up and pull all the stuffing out.

In the earlier pieces I've offered my view that an awful lot of Brahms performances distort the music beyond recognition by reenacting all of the composer's struggle and suffering, showing off what they take to be his -- and therefore their great artistic seriousness. The reality is that by the time Brahms finished a piece, the heavy lifting was done. Performers who can master their often-considerable technical demands have only to tap into the spirit of the music to cash in big-time.

In this spirit, although we've still left a fair amount to say about Brahms (my goodness, we haven't even touched on the German Requiem (whose radiance tends to be obliterated by the phony sentimentality of pretend-serious performers), I thought it might be appropriate to close with this bracing performance of the Gypsy-flavored finale of the first of his three piano quartets, the G minor. It has been fascinating to watch over the last several decades as the piano quartets, once relatively neglected among the composer's output, came to be among his most-performed works. And I think there is something quintessentially "Brahmsian" about them.

(That devoted Brahmsian Arnold Schoenberg (yes, Schoenberg loved Brahms) produced an orchestral rendering of the G minor Piano Quartet which he hoped would become effectively a fifth Brahms symphony. Along with great love for and understanding of the piece, Schoenberg's orchestration is filled with naughtily zany bits of excess.)

This performance is hardly "definitive," a concept I don't believe in anyway for music of any compexity or range, and there's a lot about the movement that goes unexplored here. But the consistently fleet, energetic voice brings this wonderful quartet to a rousing conclusion:


Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is joined by (as identified by YouTube commenters) violinist Lisa Batiashvili, violist Vladimir Mendelssohn, and cellist Sonia Wieder Atherthon. If you're curious how the movement sounds in Schoenberg's loving and slightly over-the-top orchestration, there's a clip by Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony from the 2007 Proms.


QUICK HITS: SOME RECORDINGS OF THE
BRAHMS PIANO TRIOS AND QUARTETS

I have no hesitation in recommending the spacious, impassioned Borodin Trio performances of both the piano triosand the piano quartets.

For the lovely Stern-Rose-Istomin recordings of the piano trios, you want to find the set that couples them with the two majestic Schubert triosrather than the one that joins them with the oafish Stern-and-Friends performances of the Brahms piano quartets disfigured by the clunking of Manny "The Butcher" Ax. (I don't know if this is the place to mention it, but in the Beethoven bicentennial year of 1970, when Stern, Rose, and Istomin were performing the composer's chamber music for their instruments all over the world, it was the people at French television who sat them in a studio and videotaped all the piano trios -- in color and in stereo! Unfortunately no color tape of two of the trios could be found, but fortunately that didn't stop EMI from issuing a DVD setof these invaluable musical documents. It seems to me shocking but not surprising that nobody in this country thought to undertake such a recording project.)

The Szeryng-Fournier-Rubinstein performances of the First and Second Piano Trios are available as Vol. 72 of the Rubinstein Edition, and the Third Triois available as Vol. 73, coupled with half of the same trio's even more dazzlingly beautiful recording of the Schubert trios, No. 2 in E flat. (Of course then you still need Vol. 76for their performance of No. 1 in B flat.)

It's not hard to find the performances by violinist Josef Suk, cellist Janos Starker, and pianist Julius Katchen of the First and Second Piano Trios. Unfortunately,you won't easily find reasonably priced copies of the companion CDwith the Third Piano Trio and the Starker-Katchen Second Cello Sonata. If you see a reasonably priced issue of Suk's Supraphon setwith his regular trio partners, cellist Josef Chuchro and pianist Jan Panenka, filled out with a splendid performance of the beautiful Horn Trio, which we talked about in the first Brahms installment in this series), grab it.

I've already mentioned Philips' maximum-value twofer setthat supplements the fine Beaux Arts Trio performances of the three piano trios with excellent Grumiaux-and-friends performances of the Horn Trio and Clarinet Trio.

For the piano quartets, in addition to the above-noted Borodin Trio set with violist Rivka Golani, I find the performances by Arthur Rubinstein and members of the Guarneri Quartet of the First and Third Quartets, Vol. 65 of the Rubinstein Edition, a lot more appealing on CD than I ever have on LP. Unfortunately, Vol. 74, coupling the Second Quartet with the delightful Fauré First Piano Quartet, has become an expensive collector's item. I wound up doing Amazon's MP3 download, and I have to say that, while lyrical passages are lovely, the performance of the Brahms A major has much of the stodginess I associate with the experience of the LPs. The Fauré, which I don't think I ever owned on LP, is better, but still on the ponderous, decidedly unsparkling side. (I wonder whether better-than-MP3 sound would make a difference.)

An excellent bargain is the Vanguard twofer setof the lovely recordings by violinist Alexander Schneider, violist Walter Trampler, cellist Leslie Parnas, and pianist Stephanie Brown.

The performances of the piano trios (by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio) and piano quartets (by violinist Isabelle Faust, violist Bruno Giuranna, cellist Alain Meunier, and pianist Derek Han) in the budget-priced Brilliant Classics set I mentioned of the complete Brahms chamber music are outstanding.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the updated list.

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[1/22/12] Which mainstay of the chamber music literature was first heard in 1855 in, of all places, NYC? (continued)

As promised, here's the Scherzo of Op. 8 played by the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio. Again, I suggest keeping the volume down.


BRAHMS: Piano Trio No. 1 in B, Op. 8:
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto; Meno allegro
iii. Adagio
iv. Allegro


Joseph Silverstein, violin; Jules Eskin, cello; Richard Goode, piano. RCA, recorded c1968

I'm going to assume that Richard Goode (born 1943) needs no introduction. If he does, well, here's a basic bio. You can also visit his Facebook page.

Joseph Silverstein (born 1932) joined the BSO in 1955-56 -- sitting in the last chair of the second violins! -- and rose through the violin ranks until he replaced retiring concertmaster Richard Burgin in the 1962-63 season, and was active in the founding of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in 1964. He became increasingly active as a conductor, and in 1971 became assistant conductor of the BSO, and after leaving Boston, following the 1983-84 season, became conductor and then full-fledged music director of the Utah Symphony, remaining until 1998. His successor as BSO concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe, is still on the job, having long since surpassed Silverstein's 21 years as concertmaster.

Jules Eskin (born 1931) became principal cellist of the BSO in 1964, after his predecessor, Samuel Mayes, and Mayes's wife, Winifred, also a BSO cellist, were lured by Eugene Ormandy to became principal and co-principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Eskin came to Boston after three years as principal cellist with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, and he hasn't left. He was a founding member of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, as was violist Burton Fine, whom we heard Friday night in the Trout Quintet.

NOW, LET JIM LYONS EXPLAIN WHY "OPUS 8" IS
DECEPTIVELY LOW FOR THE TRIO AS WE KNOW IT

Here's most of what James Lyons had to say about the two versions of Brahms's Op. 8 in his note for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players set that includes the performance we just heard.

It must be understood that the Op. 8 introduced in New York was not quite the Op. 8 we know. Brahms was a burgeoning composer of 21 when he completed the original. Some 36 years later, as a renowned master in his late middle age, he went back to the score and overhauled it. The end product is doubtless the happiest mingling of youthful exuberance and mature wisdom in the chamber music literature.

With typical understatement, Brahms wrote to a friend about the reworked Op. 8 that he "did not provide it with a wig, but just combed and arranged its hair a little." To labor the analogy, a comparison of the two versions would indicate rather that the music had been given a shave, a shampoo and whatever else an experienced barber could effect in the interests of transformation. But in fact the alterations were considerably more than skin-deep.

Several of the secondary subjects were supplanted by real subsidiary motives, necessitating new development and recapitulation sections. Onl the Scherzo second movement was spared, but even there the coda was modified. The original sequence of keys is preserved, but somehow the colors are more autumnal than before; where there had been an impetuous, gypsy-like sadness there is now a kind of commanding somberness. . . . [Beethoven's] presence is felt, if not heard. A certain imperious quality comes through. But the confident contours cannot disguise a deeply felt melancholy.

NOW WE'RE JUST GOING TO LISTEN THROUGH
THE OP. 8 TRIO MOVEMENT BY MOVEMENT

With regard to the performances, it may be of interest to note, concerning the two versions of Op. 8, that already in 1854 the piece was conceived on a very large scale. Jim Lyons may have been right about the revision tipping it in the direction of melancholy, but that's not the same thing as the heaving, sweat-dripping ponderousness so often imposed on Brahms by performers who think that's called for. I think all of our performers dodge that trap. The performance that is in some ways most intriguing is the Borodin Trio's Scherzo, which in common with most of the choices in that splendid ensembles recordings of the Brahms piano trios and quartets is conceived on a monumental scale and maintains quite a high intensity level -- but note how substantially they fill out that framework; note the payoff they get in the gorgeous central trio section (at 2:09). I think the more characteristically fleeter and lighter-textured recording by the remarkable Chung siblings provides an excellent contrast.

It seemed an obvious idea to set the two Rubinstein performances together. The much shorter timing of the classic 1941 recording is attributable, first, to the omission of the repeat; second, to clearly different interpretive priorities; and possibly third to a strong wish to fit the movement on two 78-rpm sides. [UPDATE: I meant that the 1941 timing is "much shorter" than most more recent performances. In fact, the 1972 recording doesn't take the repeat either.] Bear in mind that the earlier recording featured an ensemble that, starry as it was, was much younger. The great Feuermann (1902-1942) was two months away from his 39th birthday (which tragically would be his last), Heifetz (1901-1987) was 40, and Rubinstein (1887-1982) was the old man of the group at 54, the approximate age of the youngest participant in the 1972 recording, Szeryng (1918-1988, his birthday was later that month). Fournier (1906-1986) was 66, and Rubinstein 85.

I also thought it would be interesting to put the two Josef Suk recordings together, and the Adagio seemed the movement in which to do it. Finally, for the finale we have two sets of really outstanding musicians, and I love the to-the-point urgency of the Brandis-Borwitzky-Vásáry performance. The Trio di Trieste makes what I consider an exceedingly risky choice in going with the darkly dreamlike quality of the music -- risky in that it can so easily lead to just the kind of bloating and ponderousness I was talking about -- but as with the Borodin Trio's wonderfully grand-scaled Scherzo, the Trieste finale seems to me quite beautifully sustained.

The brief Wikipedia article on the piece has some brief descriptions of the movements which may be helpful.

BRAHMS: Piano Trio No. 1 in B, Op. 8

i. Allegro con brio

Wikipedia: "This movement is a sonata form movement in B major, with a broad theme that begins in the cello and piano and builds in intensity. It is counterpoised by a more delicate anacrustic second theme in G sharp minor. This theme appeared only in the second version of the trio, replacing a more complex group of themes and a fugal section in the first version."

Original version (1854)

Trio Opus 8: Eckhard Fischer, violin; Mario de Secondi, cello; Michael Hauber, piano. Arte Nova, recorded c1997

Revised version (1891)

Jascha Heifetz, violin; Emanuel Feuermann, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA/BMG, recorded in Hollywood, Sept. 11-12. 1941

Henryk Szeryng, violin; Pierre Fournier, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA/BMG, recorded in Geneva, Sept. 4-10, 1972

ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto; Meno allegro

Wikipedia: "The B minor scherzo combines delicate filigree passages with fortissimo outbursts. The exuberant mood of the first movement returns in the trio section. A tierce de picardie sets the scene for the Adagio. The only alterations Brahms applied to this movement in his revision of the work were a doubling of the climactic trio melody in the cello, and a reworking of the coda."

Original version (1854)

Trio Opus 8: Eckhard Fischer, violin; Mario de Secondi, cello; Michael Hauber, piano. Arte Nova, recorded c1997

Revised version (1891)

Borodin Trio: Rostislav Dubinsky, violin; Yuli Turovsky, cello; Luba Edlina, piano. Chandos, recorded in London, June 7-8, 1982?

Kyung Wha Chung, violin; Myung Wha Chung, cello; Myung Whun Chung, piano. Decca, recorded in Vienna, Apr. 30-May 3, 1987

iii. Adagio

Wikipedia: "This movement, returning to B major, opens with a spacious chordal theme in the piano, counterpoised by a middle section in which the cello plays a poignant G sharp minor melody making use of chromaticism. In the first version, a different second theme was used, and an Allegro section was included near the end of the movement."

Original version (1854): Adagio non troppo

Trio Opus 8: Eckhard Fischer, violin; Mario de Secondi, cello; Michael Hauber, piano. Arte Nova, recorded c1997

Revised version (1891)

Suk Trio: Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Jan Panenka, piano. Supraphon, recorded in Prague, Sept. 7-11, 1976

Josef Suk, violin; Janos Starker, cello; Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded at the Maltings, Snape (England), July 1968

iv. Allegro

Wikipedia: "Back in B minor, the first theme of this movement is highly chromatic and slightly ambiguous tonally, with a very agitated dotted rhythm. This is perhaps the movement Brahms altered the most between the two versions, with the cello's original smooth second theme in F sharp major being replaced by a more vigorous arpeggiated piano theme in D major. After a B major episode recalling the mood of the first movement, the music returns to minor and ends very turbulently."

Original version (1854): Allegro molto agitato

Trio Opus 8: Eckhard Fischer, violin; Mario de Secondi, cello; Michael Hauber, piano. Arte Nova, recorded c1997

Revised version (1891)

Trio di Trieste: Renato Zanettovich, violin; Libero Lana, cello; Dario de Rosa, piano. DG, recorded in Berlin, May 24-25, 1967

Thomas Brandis, violin; Ottomar Borwitzky, cello; Tamás Vásáry, piano. DG, recorded in Berlin, September 1981


FINALLY, WE HAVE A STRAY BIT. I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT, AS
IT'S ALL I HAVE TO SHOW FROM A MASSIVE PROJECT . . .

. . . which had come to make less and less sense, though it started as what seemed like a reasonable enough idea. In order to have a second complete Brahms B major for this post, I was going to do a digital dub of the c1952 Westminster recording by pianist Paul Badura-Skoda, Jean Fournier, and cellist Antonio Janigro, from my original "WL" series pressing (for reasons I don't really understand, those old Westminster LPs have acquired quite a cachet), which would also give me a chance to listen to it, since I really don't have any recollection of it.

So I dubbed the first side of the LP, with the first two movements, and then started declicking. My LP looks lovely, but jeez, was there stuff to try to get rid of on it. I spent hours and hours on it (four? five? six?) -- enough to know that there was no way I was going to continue on with the third and fourth movements. It was the sort of insane task you only continue because of the amount of time you've already got invested in it, and then the more time you put into it, the more impossible it becomes to stop. Working backwards, I had finished the second movement and was literally all the way back to the first 15 seconds of the first movement when I had to deal with something else, and the something else wound up forcing me to restart my computer -- and poof, there went the declicked file!

After a while I remembered that I had made an MP3 file of the second movement, so here it is. It's really not a bad performance. I would have liked to listen to the more or less declicked first movement. I gather, by the way, that violinist Jean Fournier was the younger brother of cellist Pierre, but the bios I've seen of the latter make no mention of a brother, and the "bio" of Jean on on the Westminster LP is biographically limited to the facts that he was born in Paris and won First Prize at the Paris Conservatory.

BRAHMS: Piano Trio No. 1 in B, Op. 8:
ii. Scherzo: Allegro molto; Meno allegro


Jean Fournier, violin; Antonio Janigro, cello; Paul Badura-Skoda, piano. Westminster, recorded c1952


OKAY, IF YOU MISSED THE GOODE-BSCP TROUT AND
AREN'T UP TO CLICKING THE LINK, HERE IT IS AGAIN

SCHUBERT: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A, D. 667 (Trout):
i. Allegro vivace
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo: Presto
iv. Theme and Variations: Andantino; Allegretto
v. Finale: Allegro giusto


Boston Symphony Chamber Players: Richard Goode, piano (guest artist); Joseph Silverstein, violin; Burton Fine, viola; Jules Eskin, cello; Henry Portnoi, double bass. RCA, recorded c1968 [audio link]


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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