Chamber Delights

THURSDAY, 16 JUNE 2022
9:00 P.M.
LIBRARY OF THE NEUSTIFT MONASTERY

This year’s Chamber Delights will be performed by a piano quartet, which is something of a rarity compared with the more common piano trio or string quartet. Comprising Boris Brovtsyn (violin), Sindy Mohamed (viola), Arthur Hornig (cello) and Julia Okruashvili (piano), the quartet will play three compositions that rarely make an appearance on international concert programmes – a movement of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major and Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor.

Nowadays, the fact that Gustav Mahler – who is best known as a composer of great symphonies – ever wrote chamber music is a well-kept secret. This is hardly surprising given that very few people were aware of Mahler’s chamber music even during his lifetime and that most of his early works have been lost due to his reckless treatment of his music manuscripts. Composed when Mahler was just 16 years of age, the allegro movement of his Piano Quartet in A minor is one of these early pieces of chamber music. Mahler also wrote a violin sonata and two piano quintets, but the surviving movement of the Piano Quartet in A minor is the most successful of his chamber music compositions, something Mahler himself agreed with: “The best of them was a piano quartet, which I wrote at the end of my four Conservatory years and which proved a great success.” Here, however, he was talking about the complete four-movement piano quartet. As mentioned above, only the allegro movement of this Piano Quartet in A minor has survived, providing us with a unique record of Mahler’s chamber music and his early musical talent.

Despite being rarely performed, Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major is indisputably one of the composer’s most notable works. After composing his first piano quartet – Piano Quartet in D major op. 23 – in 1875 and despite being repeatedly encouraged and urged to write another by his publisher Fritz Simrock, Dvořák waited almost 15 years before composing his second in E-flat major. Interestingly, it was likely the success of Johannes Brahms’s three piano quartets – which were also published by Simrock – which caused Dvořák to hesitate for so long before finally finding the time and inspiration to fulfil his publisher’s wish and compose the Piano Quartet in E-flat major in the summer of 1889. The extent to which Dvořák was influenced by Brahms is arguably evident in the numerous parallels between his quartet and those composed by his German counterpart.

When Johannes Brahms sent his Piano Quartet in G minor with its famous Rondo alla Zingarese, inspired by Hungarian-Romani music, to his friend Joseph Joachim, a born-and-bred Hungarian, Joachim was happy to concede that Brahms had “beaten him on his own turf”. Brahms was fully aware of the popularity of Hungarian-Romani music in Vienna and chose to make his Viennese debut as a composer and pianist with this piano quartet in 1862.

The entire quartet is characterised by the Hungarian-Romani style of its finale. The main theme of the first movement – which enraptured Arnold Schönberg so much so that he commented “unfortunately, it wasn't me who wrote it!” – features tonal characteristics of Hungarian-Romani melodies, chromatic notes in a melancholic folk style and a rhythm with Hungarian characteristics. All the elements are brought together and refined by the accomplished artistry for which Brahms was known.

• Tickets: € 105,00