Brahms: The String Quintets & Sextets / Alexander String Quartet

BRAHMS String Sextets Nos. 1 1 and 2 1. String Quintets Nos. 1 2 and 2 2 • Alexander Str Qrt; 1,2 Toby Appel (va); 1 David Requiro (vc) • FOGHORN 2012 (2 CDs: 130:33) Completed in 1860, the first of Brahms’s two sextets is an effusive outpouring of youthful ardor that belies the age and life-experience of the 27-year-old composer who wrote it. By 1860, Brahms had already lived through the harrowing events of Schumann’s attempted suicide, commitment to a mental institution, and premature death, not to mention the effects of those events on Clara and her children. But Brahms was also in love with Clara, or at least with some idealized love surrogate for Clara, and this B?-Major Sextet seems to sing a song of blissful, sun-filled days, until the arrival of the second movement, that is—a set of variations in D Minor on a theme strongly redolent of the Gypsy melos Brahms picked up during his tour with Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi and which would infuse much of his