Piano Quintet Op 17 & String Quartet Op 63 - Classical Music Sheet for Violin, Viola, Cello | Perfect for Chamber Ensembles, Music Students & Performances

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Product description Minguet Quartett Review Cpo continues apace with its series of releases dedicated to Heinrich von Herzogenberg. If you're searching for these discs at arkivmusic.com, you will find only four of them listed under the composer's last name. That's because the remaining entries, as of this writing, are filed under the composer's first name, Heinrich. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Since most of the previous releases in this series have already been reviewed in prior Fanfare issues, I will dispense with the usual biographical background. By now, regular readers know that Herzogenberg was a close friend of Brahms--perhaps a little too close for Brahms's comfort--and that his own compositional efforts were perhaps a little too imitative of his icon's musical vocabulary and style. Expectations are thus confounded by Herzogenberg's early Piano Quintet in C-Major, a work dating from 1875 that sounds nothing like Brahms. Herzogenberg was already 32 at the time the piece was published, by no means a youth. But what he had been doing up until then was genuflecting to Wagner and the New Germans. His "Odysseus" Symphony and, in particular, his 1870 dramatic cantata, Columbus, with its echoes of The Flying Dutchman, had set Herzogenberg on a very different path from the one he was about to take. The year of this Quintet seems to have been a crucial one for him, for it was in 1875 that he joined forces with Alfred Volkland and Philipp Spitta to found the Leipzig Bach Society, and it was around this same time that the process of latching onto his replacement guru was complete. Wagner was out; Brahms was in. It's hard to describe the Quintet. Hermann Kretzschmar, successor to Volkland as conductor of the Bach Society, was highly critical, writing, "At last somebody again dares not to write a sonata-form movement." He went on to complain of the virtual non-existence of a secondary theme and of irregularities in the structure of the recapitulation. Clearly, Herzogenberg was in a transitional period, and in the years to follow, he would learn much from Brahms. The main problem with the Quintet, however, is not its formal weakness, for even if it were perfect in form, nothing can disguise the extended note spinning that goes on at great length while saying little. It's not that there are no thematic ideas on which to hang a strong development, but rather that once having presented them, Herzogenberg seems at a loss as to what to do next; without its captain at the helm, the ship begins to go adrift. Still, the one thing you can't take away from him was that he had a definite talent when it came to scoring for this combination of instruments. The piano does not dominate as it does in so many piano quintets of this period, and the sound of the music, if you don't mind its waywardness, is quite lovely. If the Quintet is an example of Herzogenberg's writing just before he came under the heavy influence of Brahms, the String Quartet in F-Minor, op. 63, is an example of what became of Herzogenberg after his Brahms infatuation had pretty much passed. By 1885, Herzogenberg found himself in Berlin, heading up the composition department at the Royal Academy of Music, where he advised Ethyl Smyth to go study with Max Bruch. The Quartet, in only three movements, was written in 1889, and was his last in the genre. If there's anything about it that's suggestive of Brahms, it's in some of the more excitable gestures that rise to moments of passionate intensity. But apart from the gestural language, there are few remnants of Brahms's melodic or harmonic vocabulary. Again, as with the Quintet, the piece is well written and has its passing charms, but you may find it a bit of a chore to stick with it all the way through without your attention wandering. Both the Minguet Quartett and pianist Oliver Triendl seem to be new to cpo's Herzogenberg series, though Triendl has appeared in other repertoire on cpo, and the Minguet Quartett has recorded for other labels. At present, there do not seem to be alternative versions of either of the works on this disc, but that needn't be a deterrent if you have an interest in this late-German-Romantic composer, for the performances and recording are quite fine. I doubt this will be a CD you will play repeatedly until the little laser beam burns a hole in the disc; but it is recommended to those who have not yet had their fill of Herzogenberg from previous releases. -- Fanfare, Jerry Dubins, Jan-Feb 2010