Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Clara Schumann– Romance for Violin and Piano Op 22 No 2.
Brahms– Piano Quartet in A Op 26.
Tensions between his parents made composing difficult for Brahms while he was living at home in Hamburg in 1861. That summer, a friend rescued him by providing lodgings – including a balcony and the use of the garden – at her house on the outskirts of the city. Here, the peace and space allowed him to produce much music, including his first two piano quartets – in G minor and in A – which were the 28-year-old’s first mature masterpieces on a large-scale.
Although it would be another 15 years before he completed his first symphony, his Piano Quartet in A packs symphonic scale and proportions into a piece for just four musicians. Mirroring this connection between orchestral and chamber music were the performers at this concert: pianist Réamonn Keary plus three full-time string-players from the RTÉ National
Symphony Orchestra (Sebastian Liebig, violin; John Lynch, viola; Úna Ní Chanainn, cello).
The power of their orchestral-strength fortes was not always balanced by a corresponding sense of intimacy in quieter sections, and sometimes the music moved on before it had had time to breathe.
However, the trade-off was easy to imagine, a degree of Brahmsian insight acquired from long familiarity with his hard-earned confidence and mastery from later life in the symphonies and concertos, foreshadows of which were easily heard in this Quartet.
The string-players matched Keary’s lyricism on the piano in the warm, Schubert-influenced first movement, and found a pleasing contrast in the muted tenderness of the Adagio. It was after Brahms’s unusually subdued Scherzo that the players most often unleashed their concert hall voices, filling the lively Finale with robust energy.
Liebig and Keary opened the recital with a little Romance for violin and piano from a little-known set by Clara Schumann. Sweet, delicately crafted and unpretentious, it was accompanied by a sad little quotation from Clara’s diary in the printed programme: “Naturally it remains woman’s work, always lacking in strength and occasionally in ideas.
