Search - Steffens :: Brahms arr. Schoenberg: Piano Quartet; Brahms arr. Berio: Sonata for Clarinet & Piano

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J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 09/11/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"One either loves or hates Schoenberg's orchestral transcription of Brahms's First Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op. 25. Schoenberg, having played in many performances of the work, said he made it because so often the strings are swamped by the sound of the piano. (Also he had been asked by conductor Otto Klemperer to make the transcription in order to increase performances of Schoenberg works.) I happen to love the transcription, although it will never, of course, take the place of the original. Still it has its features which enrage the purists and amuse those of us who love Schoenberg's tongue-in-cheek humor, not the least of which is his creative use of xylophone, bells and cymbals, as well as muted brass and trombone glisses. One of the glories of the piece, in fact, is its orchestration -- which is, after all, the raison d'être of such a transcription, n'est-ce pas? -- and that is where this recording falls down. The sound tends toward the glassy and muddy, at least as compared with the 2006 recording made by Geoffrey Simon and the London Symphony on the Cala Label. Add to that violist-turned-conductor Daniel Raiskin's choice to play the second movement outrageously fast -- it's marked allegro ma non troppo by both Brahms and Schoenberg and yet it is here vivace -- and we have a loser.



The coupling is the very rarely heard transcription of Brahms's first Opus 120 clarinet sonata done by Luciano Berio, played here by clarinetist Karl-Heinz Steffens, again with Raiskin and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie. The transcription has a more chamber music feel than the Schoenberg, but it is definitely orchestrated in a 20th-century way. And it too is not as well played or recorded as the version on the above-mentioned Simon recording with clarinetist James Campbell.



If you're interested in these two pieces as coupled here, I would definitely recommend going for the Cala CD.



Scott Morrison"