First volume of a cycle dedicated to the Brahms’ chamber music for strings with the Pražák Quartet, today the last Quartet, Op.67, with its rough, bucolic, country ‘gaiety’, announces the pastoral Symphony No. 2, Op.73 of 1877. An unusual pairing with acclaimed Piano Quintet op.34, two masterpieces, superbly worked out—as always with the German Requiem’s author. This Quintet is “beautiful beyond all that might be said about it. Whoever did not known it In its previous versions […] cannot suppose that the work was not originally thought out and conceived for the present instrumental combination [… ] a masterpiece of chamber music such as we are unable to designate any other since the death of Schubert. Nothing of this level has been heard since 1828” [dixit Hermann Levi]…the year of Schubert’s Quintet in C, D 956.
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