BRAHMS String Sextets Nos. 1 and 2
Yehudi Menuhin, Robert Masters (violins); Cecil Aronowitz, Ernst Wallfisch (violas); Maurice Gendron, Derek Simpson (cellos)
EMI Classics CDE 5 74957 2 [75:02]
Recorded September 1963, December 1964, No. 1 Studio, Abbey Road — The peculiar thing about Brahms’s First Sextet—peculiar because it runs — counter to what we’ve been taught to expect from this composer—is its sheer sensuous generosity.
Six strings. Think what that means in terms of timbral possibility, the capacity for warmth, for enveloping the listener in sound that breathes and glows. And this 1963 recording understands that completely.
Menuhin assembled quite a group here: Robert Masters, then leading the Bath Festival Band (Menuhin’s own; ensemble), the superb Maurice Gendron—a cellist of genuine international standing—and three stalwarts of British chamber music life. Cecil Aronowitz’s viola sound had that particular plummy richness you heard everywhere in London in those years. The blend they achieve in the B-flat Sextet, Op.
18, isn’t the sort of homogenized perfection that modern album technology can manufacture. It’s better than that. You hear six musicians who’ve actually listened to one another, who know when to lead and when to support, when a phrase wants to expand and when it needs reining in.
The opening Allegro ma non troppo finds them discovering—yes, that’s the word—the music’s lyrical abundance as if encountering it freshly. There’s flexibility in their phrasing that never degenerates into willfulness. The famous variations of the second movement (where Brahms encrypted his farewell to Agathe — von Siebold, as the musicological gossips never tire of telling us) unfold with patient inevitability.
Gendron’s tone in the Andante, ma moderato has that slightly resinous quality, a bit of friction in the sound that reminds you these are gut strings speaking, not the homogenized silk of modern equipment. —
But then we come to the G major Sextet, Op. 36, recorded a year later in the same Abbey Road studio, and something has shifted.
The air has gone out of the room somehow. Now — the Second Sextet is undeniably a more ascetic piece—Brahms was already moving toward that late-period austerity, that refusal of easy sensuous pleasure. Six instruments producing remarkably spare textures.
The architectural logic is impeccable, the contrapuntal working flawless. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that these same players are going through motions they’ve already mastered rather than discovering new territory. Professional?
Absolutely. Inspired? That’s another question.
The Scherzo goes briskly enough, but where’s the diabolic energy that ought to animate those cross-rhythms? The great Poco Adagio should break your heart—and structurally, harmonically, it does everything right. But the emotional temperature remains a degree or two below where it needs to be.
Derek Simpson’s cello line in the slow movement is beautifully shaped, technically impeccable. I just don’t believe it the way I believed everything in Op. 18.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps the Second Sextet itself is the problem—one of those Brahms works where formal perfection doesn’t quite ignite into communicative urgency. The piece yields its secrets slowly, if at all.
But I’ve heard other performances that convinced me otherwise, that made me hear this as the profounder of the two works. Not here, though. —
The engineering—warm, clear, with that slightly dry Abbey Road acoustic—serves the First Sextet beautifully.
You can hear the individual strands without losing the ensemble’s collective warmth. EMI’s remastering has been respectful; there’s still air around the instruments — still a sense of musicians breathing together in real space. The liner notes are perfunctory to the point of condescension—”music-for-the-kiddies” stuff that tells you Brahms was born and died and that Menuhin was famous.
One almost sympathizes with the hypothetical child asking, “Hey, daddy, there’s six of them”—at least that kid is paying attention to what matters. Still, for the First Sextet alone, this disc justifies its existence several times over. This is playing that reminds you why chamber music matters, why Brahms matters, why six strings gathered in a room can create something that enlarges our understanding of what music can express.
The Second Sextet comes along for the ride—competent, correct, a bit dutiful. But Op. 18?
That’s the real thing, captured at a moment when these musicians were genuinely on fire. Essential for the First. Tolerable for the Second.
That’s a better ratio than most reissues can claim. Christopher Howell
