There is a persistent injustice in the Brahms chamber-music canon, and it has nothing to do with the quartets or the piano quintet or even the horn trio. The two string quintets — the F major, op. 88, and the G major, op. 111 — sit quietly at the back of the room while the celebrated works get all the attention, all the recordings, all the festival programming. This has always struck me as a failure of collective nerve rather than judgment.
The Uppsala Chamber Soloists have made a strong case for both pieces, and I find myself returning to this disc with something close to gratitude.
Start with the G major, op. 111, because that is where the stakes are highest. Brahms composed it in Bad Ischl in 1890, convinced — not for the first time, and not for the last — that his composing life was over. He had written to Eusebius Mandyczewski about the frustration of ideas that wouldn’t cohere, the sense that the old machinery had seized up. What emerged instead was one of the most physically exhilarating things he ever wrote for strings, the opening cello melody cutting loose with a kind of muscular abandon you don’t hear anywhere else in his chamber music. The Uppsala players understand this. Their cellist launches that melody with genuine weight and projection, not the cautious, blended tone you sometimes get from groups nervous about disturbing the ensemble texture. The viola writing — Brahms followed Mozart’s model here, two violas rather than two cellos, which gives the inner voices an unusual richness and independence — is handled with real character, the first viola emerging at crucial moments as something close to a soloist. There is a gruffness to the scherzo that the Uppsalans catch exactly right: not rough, but unsmiling.
The F major, op. 88, is a different animal entirely. Three movements, not four. More intimate in scale, more inward in its emotional address. Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann about it with a warmth he rarely permitted himself regarding his own work — the same man who referred to his First Symphony as a long and not particularly amusing exercise. The Uppsala reading finds the right tone: conversational, unhurried, with a lovely sense of the music’s unusual formal compression. The middle movement is one of those Brahmsian hybrids — part slow movement, part scherzo — and it takes real confidence to navigate the shifts of character without making them feel arbitrary. Here the ensemble does well, the transitions handled with a naturalness that sounds easy and is anything but.
A word about the competition. Recordings of these quintets are not as plentiful as they should be, but the benchmark remains formidable — the old Amadeus Quartet with Cecil Aronowitz on EMI, for example, brought a richness and interpretive authority to op. 111 that has not been easily surpassed. The Uppsala players are not quite in that territory. Their ensemble is clean, their intonation reliable, their musical instincts generally sound; what they occasionally lack is the last degree of expressive abandon, the willingness to let the music’s darker and more turbulent impulses fully off the leash. The first movement of op. 111 wants, at certain moments, a rawness they approach but don’t quite reach.
Still. These are serious, well-considered performances of two works that deserve far better than their current neglect. If this disc prompts a few listeners to finally spend real time with the G major quintet — one of Brahms’s genuinely great late utterances, composed at the moment he believed himself finished — it will have done something worth doing.
