Sextets: Brahms, Op. 36 and Tchaikovsky, Op. 70 "Souvenir de Florence"

Last night was a sextet evening, in part to welcome back for a visit the first violinist of my former regular quartet, back in Boston for a few months, and also because I have a birthday coming up that's divisible by six. :-)  An ambitious program, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but I had a lot of fun, and I think others did, too.

I like to play bridge, and occasionally a friend of mine will get me to try a six-handed version, with a deck of cards with six suits instead of the usual four.  My feeling when I play is that I'm trying to cram 50% more stuff into my head than usual.  And that's the same feeling I get playing sextets after a diet of nothing larger than quartets.  So much to try to keep track of!

It was interesting to play pieces by Brahms and Tchaikovsky back-to-back, two such different composers.  Brahms is not noted as a composer with particular melodic invention (with one glaring exception: I wonder if he realized that Op. 49, No. 4 was going to be his lasting claim to popularity?)  Tchaikovsky crams Souvenir de Florence with one tune after another.  Brahms is strongly in the tradition of Haydn when it comes to his chamber music, providing interest for all the players through motivic development, passing small musical ideas among them.  Tchaikovsky tries this occasionally, but when he gets one of his great tunes going, the rest of the sextet is reduced to pure accompaniment.  (This worked out well last night: our visiting first violinist is a real superstar, a joy to listen to.  But it does get a little tedious to play forty measure of pizzicato triplets, for example).

Brahms and Tchaikovsky also differ in a quality I can only describe as subtlety.  My late wife Roberta used to remark that playing Brahms is easy: all you have to do is get the notes in the right place, and the music plays itself.  Of course, Brahms makes that very difficult, with his continual three-against-two, displacement of harmonic rhythm, and metrical ambiguity.  I sometimes wish that Brahms had had the courage to change meter to fit the music, the way the composers of the following century did.

Tchaikovsky is not a subtle composer at all, particularly in his use of dynamics.  I started the last page of Souvenir de Florence at forte, but since I'd practiced, I knew that not only did I have to go to fortissimo (ff), and then fortississimo (fff), but by the end, he's at quadruple forte (ffff)!  The end of the first movement is marked "tutta forza".  At least he didn't put a crescendo after that. :-)

By the way, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has on their website an amazing library of free recordings of their concerts.  The performance of Souvenir de Florence I linked to above is particularly good.

Oh, one more thing.  It's rare in my life that I get direct evidence that the muscles that move the fingers aren't in the fingers or hand, but actually in the forearm.  But I did last night: after finishing the Tchaikovsky, those muscles in my left forearm let their presence be known.  Ouch!

P.S.  I forgot to mention that we found two misprints involving rehearsal number in the Brahms, and I wanted to document them here in case anyone searches for such things.  Edition Peters, Nr. 3906b, Brahms Streich-Sextett G-Dur, Opus 36.  In the second cello part, in the last movement, rehearsal number 5 is missing entirely; it should be at the beginning of the last bar, fourth line from the end.  In the second viola part, rehearsal number 5 is a bar early; it should be in the middle of the 2-bar multirest.