Brahms - String Quartet 1 [Melos String Quartet]
It took Brahms until he was 40 years old before he wrote a String Quartet that he felt worth keeping, a sure sense of the shadow of Beethoven hung over the critical Brahms, he composed this Quartet while on holiday in Ziegelhausen.
The String Quartets of Brahms have also come late to me in my own life, and i'm only beginning to get to grips with them, but they are certainly worth getting to know.
The Melos Quartet have been around since 1965, but these Germans decided to end the Quartet in 2005 after the death of their lead Violinist, they have made some wonderful recordings for Deutsche Grammophon over the years, and this three disc boxset is very collectible.
The first movement is full of power and vigour, written in a minor key, it certainly has an anger in fortissimos, and a sadness in the quieter moments, there's this fast bowing device that is used throughout this movement, it creates a nice tension, also another device that Brahms uses, is to throw this fast bowing technique around all of the strings, it gets swapped around between one player, and then another, also it's a stop/start type of music, it alternates back and forth between fast and slow, the agitated tone just won't go away, there's this exciting little moment about two thirds into the movement, where all the strings are involved in this exclamation from treble to bass, which passes through all the players in quick-fire succession four times [6:44-6:50], this must defeat amateur Quartets, a real tour-de-force, with hardly a breather, but tremendously exciting though.
Here's the Eclat Quartet playing this work on YouTube.
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