I've been playing a lot of quintets recently, rather than quartets (and I'll be playing more this evening). In the case of this evening, there were two reasons: I wanted to get a chance to play with a violist who had been recommended to me without having to give up my C string, and one of the violinists I play with regularly is moving away this summer, and she particularly likes Brahms; we're trying to fill her up before she departs. It was a wonderful evening of music, although in retrospect, programming both Brahms quintets was a bit of a stretch, and perhaps too much of a good thing.
There are seven pieces of chamber music for strings alone that Brahms published, and they fall neatly into three groups: the two early sextets, Op. 18 and 36; the three string quartets, Op. 51/1, 51/2, and Op 67; and these two late viola quintets, Op. 88 and Op. 111. I find it hard to feel them as late works: while they have their moments of pathos, in places they're some of the happiest, sunniest music Brahms wrote.
These are typical Brahms pieces in many ways: lots of three-against-two, lots of nobody-on-the-downbeat, lots of metrical displacement (something that feels like a downbeat, but isn't). Added to that some difficult meters (there's room for a lot of eighth notes in 3/2, and even more sixteenth notes in 9/8!) and you get what makes Brahms so difficult to play (and we haven't even gotten to his occasionally awkward string writing). My late wife Roberta Lukes used to quip that playing Brahms was easy: all you had to do was get the notes in the right places and the music played itself. :-) If only that weren't so challenging to do!
I guess the feature that makes these feel late is that they're harmonically adventurous, even for Brahms. The slow movement of the F major quintet is in the distant key of C-sharp minor (and goes even father afield: you know you're in trouble when you get, not only B sharps and F double sharps, but C double sharps!). The last movement of Op. 111 can't decide whether it's in B minor or G major, and near the end, the whole group an F-sharp major scale, leading to an F-sharp major seventh chord. That resolves to a G major chord for the last rollicking section of the movement: a perfectly natural kind of deceptive cadence, but to me, it feels like Brahms is saying, "Oh, %^$#, I'm way too far from the home key. Well, maybe I'll just pretend that this modulation works, and no one will notice". (The section I'm talking about starts at about 3:45 on this YouTube video.)
I have grumbled before that Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but, boy, are his thick textures wonderful! There's nothing quite like the feeling of being in my living room, bathed in an ocean of absolutely gorgeous sound! Just listen to these pieces, and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. If you only have time to listen to a little, the opening of Op. 111 is just incredible, and one of the pieces that gives me such cello envy. I even transposed the opening solo up an octave so that I could attempt it on the viola. Technically, it works, but it just sounds all wrong. Both the violin and cello have wonderful sounds in the upper register: let's just say that the upper register of the viola is an acquired taste. :-)
I got to play second viola all evening, which worked out well: firstly, because it's the closest I'm actually going to get to being a cellist, and secondly, because out guest violist was an absolutely wonderful player, with amazing tone on the big viola solos.
One note about editions: we played both quintets from new Peters editions, but they leave a lot to be desired. Some misprints (a missing eighth rest in the second viola part of Op.. 111: page 15, fourth line, last measure), some bad page turns (but who knows if there could be better ones) and some editorial choices that enraged one of our violinists. The opening of Op. 88 is marked "IV" for the first violin, specifying that the entire passage should be played high on the G string. But Op. 88 is one of the few Brahms works for which we have the manuscript, and as you can see, Brahms indicates nothing of the kind. This kind of thing is enough to make me want to do my own edition of the Brahms quintets. In my copious free time. :-)
A last off topic note; I've written before about my new white LED downlights. I was practicing earlier this week, and looked at my C string while tuning it. I saw a bizarre strobe effect, as if the string were just wobbling back and forth. I figured out what was causing it: the LEDs must be getting AC current, and in each downlight, half the LEDs are turning on each half cycle of 60Hz. So the fixtures as a whole are flashing at 120Hz: too fast to be noticeable as a flicker to the unaided eye, but enough to make the 130Hz viola C string look like something you'd see at the Boston Museum of Science. :-)
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