ASQ Brahms Cycle Now on Pair of CDs

courtesy of Naxos of America

Readers may recall that, a little over a year ago, when we were relying on streaming services for concert performances, this site reported on streamed video recordings of all three of the string quartets composed by Johannes Brahms in performances by the Alexander String Quartet (ASQ). Those videos were made under pandemic conditions about half a year earlier. At that time Paul Yarbrough was still the violist, performing with violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz and cellist Sandy Wilson. The video recording session also included an “encore” in the form of the second of the Opus 118 short pieces for piano that Brahms composed late in life, transcribed for the quartet by Grafilo.

At the beginning of last month, FoghornClassics released a two-CD set of those ASQ performances (including the Opus 118 transcription). Given the quality of the video version, it would not surprise me to learn that the CDs amounted to the “soundtrack” of that video content. I have to confess that I am a little disappointed that a DVD of this content has not yet been released.

For the most part, the string quartet genre was not in Brahms’ “comfort zone.” The two Opus 51 quartets did not come easily. The Wikipedia page of his compositions notes that Brahms wrote, and then destroyed, twenty quartets prior to Opus 51, which was, itself, a struggle that lasted between 1865 and 1873.

Ironically, Brahms had built up an impressive catalog of chamber music prior to 1865, much of which gets frequent exposure on the recital circuit. As a result, the catalog of recordings of Opus 51 is relatively modest compared to just about any other genre of chamber music in the Brahms catalog. In that context I felt that the ASQ videos of these two quartets could guide the ear of the attentive listener through the players’ body language supplementing the audio track. By 1875 Brahms’ seemed to have found his “comfort zone” in his Opus 67 quartet in B-flat major. This piece was far more accessible to attentive listening, but that was the last string quartet that Brahms composed.

To be fair, one gets the impression that ASQ put a fair amount of cerebral effort into how they approached their performances. However, the impact of that effort is much better appreciated when one watches them execute those performances. The visual cues are often subtle, but attentive listeners should be able to learn to “read the signals” relatively quickly. In the absence of those cues, some may wish to resort to score-following. However, there is a density to many of the passages that may leave the score-reader struggling as if in a fog. These are performances in which seeing is not only believing but also convincing.