Brahms: Piano Quintet & Horn Trio - John Browning, Members of the Orchestra of St. Luke's

Brahms, for all his imagination, skill, musical fluency, and sheer genius, was a most tentative composer. It is alleged that he destroyed more than half of his chamber-music output. He wait­ed until his 40th year to publish his first string quartet. We don't know how many destroyed quartets were its forerunners. We do know, however, that he tackled that most sacred of musical forms only after having written his miraculous Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8, his brilliant series of piano quartets (Opp. 25, 26 and 60), and his hauntingly beautiful sextets (Opp. 18 and 36). When it came to quartet writing, Brahms was bedeviled by the ghosts of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He felt unworthy of those three great exemplars of musical perfection, and entered their exclusive turf only after he felt reasonably secure in his own musical prowess. The same holds true for his symphonies. How dare he, a mere mortal, presume to write in a form that the great Beethoven had brought to such Olympian heights? Brahms' first symphony was more than 20 years in the making, and he was 43-years old at its completion. Its numerous false starts became subsumed into other works. The most famous being an otherworldly sarabande that ended up as the second section of his Ein Deutsches Requiem, "Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras.”