Brahms: String Sextets nos. 1 and 2
Yehudi Menuhin and Robert Masters, violins; Cecil Aronowitz and Ernst Wallfisch, violas; Maurice Gendron and Derek Simpson, cellos.
EMI Classics CDE 5 74957 2. Recorded September 1963 (op. 18) and December 1964 (op. 36), Abbey Road Studio One. Compact disc, 75:02.
There’s something almost perverse about the way we’ve come to think of Brahms’s chamber music—all that Nordic gloom, that Teutonic heaviness. The String Sextet no. 1 in B-flat Major, op. 18, makes nonsense of such lazy thinking. Here is music of such radiant warmth, such generous melodic abundance, that one wonders how the stereotype ever took hold. Perhaps we needed these six musicians, gathered at Abbey Road in September 1963, to remind us.
The roster itself tells you something. Menuhin—already past his prodigy phase, settling into his festival-director years at Bath. Robert Masters, who led that very orchestra. Gendron, the French cellist who’d partnered Casals and knew what it meant to truly sing on gut. And three fine British chamber players who understood that ensemble work means listening, not just playing.
They listen beautifully here.
The opening of op. 18 unfolds with that particular kind of confidence that comes from musicians who’ve internalized the score so completely they can afford to breathe. Notice how the second violin and first viola exchange that rising figure in the exposition—there’s a conversational ease, almost an intimacy, that larger string forces can never quite achieve. The variations of the slow movement (those Brahmsian variations that aren’t really variations at all but refractions of light through the same prism) emerge with uncommon clarity. Each player seems to know exactly when to step forward, when to recede into the texture.
The "scherzo" dances. Actually dances—no mean feat in Brahms, where the dance impulse so often gets trapped in developmental thickets. Here the rhythmic vitality never flags, yet there’s none of that driven, metronomic quality that mars lesser performances. And the "finale", with its Hungarian colorings, crackles with an energy that feels spontaneous rather than calculated.
One hears the warmth of Abbey Road’s Studio One in this recording—that characteristic EMI sound from the early sixties, before the engineers got obsessed with clinical separation. The six instruments occupy a credible acoustic space. You can place each player, yet the blend never suffers. Then comes op. 36 in G Major, recorded a year later in December 1964. And here—how to put this?—the temperature drops noticeably.
It’s not that the playing is inadequate. These are consummate professionals, and the technical standard remains high. But something has shifted. Where op. 18 felt inevitable, op. 36 feels dutiful. The first movement’s lean textures (and they are remarkably spare for six strings) emerge with precision but without the sense of discovery that animated its companion. That haunting slow movement, which Brahms himself said contained the “tombstone” of his relationship with Agathe von Siebold—one wants to be moved, and the music certainly supports such a response. Yet these players seem to hold it at arm’s length.
Perhaps the problem lies deeper. Op. 36, for all its structural ingenuity, can seem like Brahms working out compositional problems rather than yielding to lyrical impulse. The variations that constitute the "finale" are intellectually satisfying—one can admire how he manipulates the material—but they don’t quite catch fire. Is this the composer’s issue or the performers’? I suspect both bear some responsibility. These musicians had clearly lived with op. 18 in a way they hadn’t yet managed with its successor.
Still, even a dutiful performance of op. 36 from players of this caliber offers rewards. The "scherzo"’s driving rhythms come off well, and Gendron’s cello contributions throughout maintain a distinguished profile. But where op. 18 makes you forget you’re listening to a recording—makes you feel you’ve stumbled into a private music-making session among friends—op. 36 keeps reminding you that you’re hearing a professional job of work.
The disparity matters less than it might, given how completely this ensemble conquers the B-flat Sextet. That rendition alone justifies acquiring this disc, and at budget price there’s no reason to hesitate. EMI’s remastering serves the original tapes well, preserving both warmth and detail without the digital harshness that can plague transfers from this era.
One final observation: the liner notes, aimed at some imagined juvenile audience (“The Artist—Yehudi Menuhin”), are beneath contempt. But then, when did record companies ever understand how to write about music? No matter. The playing—at least in op. 18—speaks with an eloquence no prose can match.
