Brahms: String Quintets in F minor and B minor – review

Before it was finally transformed into perhaps the best-known of all Brahms's chamber works, the Piano Quintet in F minor Op 34 had begun life as a quintet for strings alone, its initial inspiration being Schubert's great C major Quintet. That was performed privately, but Brahms then turned it into a sonata for two pianos and then, on Clara Schumann's advice, into a piano quintet, at which point he destroyed the strings-only version. What's recorded here is a speculative reconstruction of that original quintet by Anssi Karttunen , cellist of the Zebra Trio; it's paired here with an all-strings version of the Clarinet Quintet Op 115. That reworking, a much more straightforward matter of replacing the clarinet with a second viola, is one that Brahms is known to have sanctioned; if anything, it's even more autumnal and melancholy in tone than the version with clarinet. But in both works, the lack of a contrasting tone colour, whether woodwind instrument or piano, produces rather dense, unvaried textures. However recognisable the musical material, they lack the distinctiveness and clarity of the versions we know so much better.