Brahms wrote three string quartets – or rather, he wrote three string quartets that he liked enough to let us hear them: we’ll never know how many were burned and abandoned along the way. The survivors are outpourings of angst, ardency and resolute jubilation, all characteristics that the Belceas do brilliantly. This recording features intense and wonderful quartet playing: lucid and agitated, sleek and muscular, with Corina Belcea’s silvery-lean first violin sound balanced by the huge warmth at the centre of the ensemble from violist Kzystof Chorzelski. In the Piano Quintet, pianist Till Fellner’s light touch makes him less of a soloist, more of an integrated texture – he’s a good match for the Belceas in that respect, but it feels like he’s responding rather than instigating. Some listeners might reasonably like their Brahms with a burlier kind of pianism.
