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Op.120 No1 for Clarinet and Orchestra – Orchestrated by Luciano Berio, 1986
My own Lossless CD rip
LSO conducted by Geoffrey Simon
Schoenberg began his arrangement of Brahms’ quartet in May of 1937 in Los Angeles, where he had moved to escape the dangerous political atmosphere in Europe, and completed his work in September of that year. He explained his reasons for choosing this work in a letter to Alfred Frankenstein, music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, in March of 1939:
"My reasons: I like the piece.
It is seldom played.
It is always very badly played, because, the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.
My intentions: To remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not to go farther than he himself would have gone if he lived today.
To watch carefully all the laws to which Brahms obeyed and not to violate them, which are only known to musicians educated in his environment."
Schoenberg changed none of the notes of Brahms’ original score. The extent to which he adhered to Brahms’ style, however, is open to some interpretation. The arrangement includes a style of chromatic writing for the brass that Brahms did not use, even after such writing became technically possible; brass is also used more heavily to double the melodic line than is typical for Brahms. (Schoenberg is said to have suggested that if Brahms had been aware of such modern scoring he would have used it.) The coloristic writing in Schoenberg’s version of the fourth movement includes decidedly un-Brahmsian appearances by xylophone, glockenspiel, and cymbals, as well as trombone glissandos, brass double-tonguing, and divisi strings. Yet in general Schoenberg’s arrangement makes a compelling case for the symphonic quality of Brahms’ original work. As Redwood Symphony’s conductor Eric Kujawsky has written:
"Most of Schoenberg’s arrangements say more about him than they do about the music he was adapting. In this case, however, he was uncommonly respectful, dealing as he was with the predecessor he probably admired above all others save Mozart. Where in his arrangements of concertos by Handel and Monn he sought to remedy what he regarded as the deficiencies in Baroque style, here he was concerned with releasing a potentiality latent in the music, for like several of Brahms’s early large-scale works, his G minor piano quartet is a budding symphony."
Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert.
The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer’s taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today’s concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms’s late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms’s own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement.
Brahms (orch. Schoenberg)
Piano Quartet in G minor, Op.25
40:01
1
i.Allegro
13:06
2
ii.Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo
8:01
3
iii. Andante con moto
10:15
4
iv.Rondo alla zingarese: Presto
8:34
Brahms (orch. Berio)
Op.120 No.1 for Clarinet and Orchestra
James Campbell clarinet
21:39
5
i.Allegro appassionato
7:10
6
ii.Andante un poco adagio
5:26
7
iii.Allegretto grazioso
4:24
8
iv.Vivace
4:45
TT: 61:50
Review:
"You can now enjoy two large-scale orchestral works which are vintage Brahms that did not exist, whatever purists may grumble. Performance and recording add to the total success of this whole project and I am glad that this work has been done." Classical Collection
Take care.