Fuchs, Brahms - Clarinet Quintets by Sebastian Manz / The Danish String Quartet

Robert Fuchs, Johannes Brahms

Sebastian Manz / The Danish String Quartet

Fuchs, Brahms - Clarinet Quintets

Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085533008
Catnr: AVI 8553300
Release date: 27 March 2014
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085533008

Catalogue number
AVI 8553300

Release date
27 March 2014

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

On 15 October 1895, Johann Strauss, Jr. celebrated the 50th anniversary of his performing career. One of the first guests to arrive and pay his respects to the “king of waltzes” was a great admirer, Johannes Brahms. Perhaps not just present to congratulate his fellow-composer, Brahms was certainly also interested in getting to hear a piece written specifically for the occasion: Robert Fuchs’s Serenade No. 5, a witty, cheerful work containing some quotes from Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus.
Fuchs attracted Brahms’s notice very early on. Brahms once praised him as “a splendid musician: everything is so fine and so skilful, so charmingly invented!” But Brahms was also aware of his younger colleague’s limitations. As other contemporaries remarked, Fuchs’s music was pleasant but often lacked dramatic effect. Born in 1847 as the youngest of thirteen children of a Styrian village schoolteacher, Fuchs’s lifelong reputation may even have suffered somewhat from the immediate success of his Serenade No. 1 for Orchestra in 1874: from then on, everyone referred to him as the “serenader fox”.
"Fuchs is never really profound”, Brahms remarked. Fuchs was nevertheless one of the rare composers in whom Brahms showed greater interest at all (as their common friend, the surgeon Theodor Billroth, noted). Moreover, Brahms energetically promoted Fuchs’s career. For instance, ”the extremely modest, timid and shy Fuchs had previously felt quite embarrassed” in negotiations with the Kistner publishing house; so Brahms put in a recommendation for him with Friedrich Simrock, his own publisher. Vienna musicologist Adalbert Grote also suspects that Brahms had a hand in Fuchs’s appointment as harmony professor at Vienna Conservatory. And since Fuchs led a rather precarious existence, Brahms helped him out financially as well........
Fuchs, like Brahms, treats the clarinet as first among equals. Connecting two main lyrical themes with a striking transitional motif, the first movement exudes a winning Viennese charm reminiscent of Schubert.... (excerpt from the line notes by Eva Blaskewitz).

Am 15. Oktober 1895 feierte Johann Strauß sein 50-jähriges Bühnenjubiläum. Unter den ersten Gästen, die ihm in der Wiener Igelgasse 4 ihre Aufwartung machten, war Johannes Brahms, ein großer Verehrer des Walzerkönigs. Doch möglicherweise galt sein Interesse nicht ausschließlich dem Jubilar, sondern auch einer Komposition, die eigens für diesen Anlass entstanden war: die fünfte Serenade von Robert Fuchs, ein heiter-geistreiches Werk mit Zitaten aus der "Fledermaus".
Schon früh hat Fuchs Brahms' Interesse erregt. Er sei "doch ein famoser Musiker, alles so fein, so gewandt, so reizend erfunden!", äußerte dieser einmal. Allerdings hat er auch die Grenzen des jüngeren Kollegen gesehen, dem die Zeitgenossen Liebenswürdigkeit, aber auch einen Mangel an Dramatik attestierten. In gewisser Weise ist es Fuchs, der 1847 als jüngstes von 13 Kindern eines Dorfschullehrers in der Steiermark zur Welt kam, zum Verhängnis geworden, dass er einen fulminanten Durchbruch mit seiner ersten Orchester-Serenade erlebte: Den Spitznamen "Serenaden-Fuchs" wurde er zeitlebens nicht mehr los.
"Tief geht Fuchs ja nirgends", bemerkte auch Brahms. Dennoch war Fuchs "einer von den Wenigen [...], an denen er größeres Interesse" zeigte, wie der mit beiden befreundete Arzt Theodor Billroth schreibt. Und Brahms hat sich nachdrücklich für ihn eingesetzt: Er empfahl ihn seinem eigenen Verleger Friedrich Simrock, da die Verhandlungen mit dem Verlag Kistner "den sehr bescheidenen und ängstlich-höflichen Fuchs sehr geniert" hätten; er hatte, so vermutet der Musikwissenschaftler Adalbert Grote, bei dessen Berufung zum Harmonielehre-Professor am Wiener Konservatorium seine Hände im Spiel; und er half dem in prekären Verhältnissen lebenden Fuchs großzügig mit Geld aus...........
Wie Brahms hat Fuchs der Klarinette die Rolle einer "prima inter pares" zugeschrieben. Im ersten Satz, der einen betörenden, an Schubert erinnernden Wienerischen Charme verströmt, werden zwei lyrische Themen durch einen prägnanten Überleitungsgedanken verbunden. (aus dem Booklettext von Eva Blaskewitz).

Artist(s)

Sebastian Manz

The Danish String Quartet

The Danish String Quartet has reached incredible heights in the course of its 10 years of existence. In January 2012 the quartet was appointed to the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two programme begin- ning with the 2013-2014 season. This achievement comes as the last in a row of distinguished accomplishments. In 2009 the quartet not only won First Prize in the Eleventh London International String Quartet Competition, but its performance was so convincing that it was awarded four additional prizes; The 20th Century Prize, the Beethoven Prize, the Sidney Griller Award and the Menton Festival Prize. Prior to this triumph the quartet has won competi- tions in Denmark, Norway and Holland. In 2006 the Danish String Quartet was the...

The Danish String Quartet has reached incredible heights in the course of its 10 years of existence. In January 2012 the quartet was appointed to the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two programme begin- ning with the 2013-2014 season. This achievement comes as the last in a row of distinguished accomplishments.
In 2009 the quartet not only won First Prize in the Eleventh London International String Quartet Competition, but its performance was so convincing that it was awarded four additional prizes; The 20th Century Prize, the Beethoven Prize, the Sidney Griller Award and the Menton Festival Prize. Prior to this triumph the quartet has won competi- tions in Denmark, Norway and Holland.

In 2006 the Danish String Quartet was the Danish Radio ‘Artist in Residence’. The residency gave the quartet opportunity to record all Carl Nielsen’s String Quartets in the Danish Radio Concert Hall. The recordings were released on the Dacapo label in 2007 and 2008 and they were hailed by the critics as extremely successful record- ings. 2012 will see a new release from the quartet with works by Bartok and Beethoven.

The high technical and musical quality, the joy of playing, the powerful impact the quartet makes on stage and the fresh approach to familiar repertoire has become a trademark for the Danish String Quartet. These qualities have led the quartet to success everywhere. The four young musicians have performed all over Europe, returning repeat- edly to particularly Germany and the UK, where Wigmore Hall is one of the venues. The quartet was announced NORDMETALL –Ensemble Prize Winner 2010 in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival in Germany.

The Danish String Quartet’s main teacher and mentor is Professor Tim Frederiksen. In addition the quartet has participated in master classes and received instruction from the Tokyo- and Emerson Quartets, Alasdair Tait, Paul Katz and Hugh Maguire.

The quartet was awarded the highly prestigious Carl Nielsen Prize 2011 which is Denmarks largest cultural prize.

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Composer(s)

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

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