What can make you a Nothing of Eighth-note rest! Elisabeth Leonskaja sits in Berlin’s Pierre-Boulez-room at the piano, strikes the first A-Major chord in the piano Quartet, op.26 by Johannes Brahms and lets him breathe. So, in a tiny moment in sound and pace of a Grand narrative, by letting loose. The End immediately the room and says: We have time, we don’t have to rush, we are Crowded, and it focuses us on the body; in front of us-Wide. And Claudius Popp from the string Quartet of the Staatskapelle Berlin, tells her in the fifth stroke on the cello with swaying nest, between then and when an almost old-fashioned, unheard of value Portamento love sneaks to get a feeling of blissful Gliding from one note to the next, telling his plan from, from the ability, also left smiling melancholy.
Jan Brachmann
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
It is amazing how the young Brahms, not yet thirty years old at the world premiere of the two piano quartets, op.25 and 26, here his mental “Umheimatung”. The Hamburger is a Wiener. The rest of the storytelling, the nachlauscht the own Say again and again, from the first Eighth-note rest, is inspired by Franz Schubert, the Brahms much the swarm of ladies and as Ludwig van Beethoven, in whose succession he was made early. Like Brahms, this Quartet in A major the subject matter, the Rigor of Beethoven with Schubert’s generous Free of the material to be reconciled, is Mature, there is an artistic miracle of incredible early. And sings of the Poco adagio of the second movement, with its chain of hills of the same eighth notes in the accompaniment to the input melody in silence, the forest is home to the Brahms’s later so very honourable Peter Rosegger, even before it has been linguistically described?
Leonskaja, who lives for forty years in Vienna, and Schubert interpreter of the highest rank, felt by instinct how to Know equally of these leakage current between Schubert and Brahms, this sudden affinity for the North German to Kakania, in the empathetic nature of the Slavic Take up of Hungarian idioms. Of course, the medium is part of the Poco adagio Fragment of a Czech or Ukrainian Dumka, of course, the Rondo alla zingarese at the end of op. 25 is a Csárdás. But just as the first movement of this g minor Quartet, is in the Tradition of logical thinking of the Viennese classical period. And the musicians of the string Quartet of the Staatskapelle Berlin play here exactly on the Pointe of the thematic process: Prior to the Coda, a final cadence formula appears, which already belonged to the substance of the initial theme. It is a game with the syntactic positions of the Form, with a beginning and an end, since Joseph Haydn and Beethoven cultivated here of Brahms as a dramatic revelation staged.
The Staatskapelle Berlin in the Weimar Republic, when it was the chapel of the Prussian state, a private string Quartet, which has also occurred in the time of the GDR, in 1953, founded by Egon Morbitzer,. Eventually, this Tradition has fallen asleep. Daniel Barenboim, the General music Director of the Staatsoper in the chapel Under the Linden, and chief conductor of the state, the regrets always. In 2016, he went to his new concert master, Wolfram Brandl and asked him whether the vocal leader of the strings could not be found together in the chapel again to a Quartet. Since then, Brandl and Popp with Krzysztof Specjal to the second violin and Yulia Deyneka at the viola together chamber music.
