It's common to poke fun at Schoenberg's opulent orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, but the arrangement's sometimes gaudy colors make an interesting and valid point about Brahms' music in general, namely that you will find a wider range of forms and melodic archetypes in the chamber music than in the symphonies (leaving aside the larger quantity of the former as compared with the latter). Had Brahms found room in his symphonies for the marches and Hungarian tunes with which he liberally peppers this quartet, he might have felt duty-bound to score them much as Schoenberg does here (well, almost), with entertaining if "un-symphonic" results.

In other words, in his symphonies Brahms (over)compensates for the orchestra's tendency toward programmatic musical display with material that, however beautiful, suggests no such possibility. He feels safe using such material in chamber music precisely because the medium forces the composer to stylize and refine the original and reduce it to its bare musical essence. The danger of distracting programmatic suggestiveness is much less.

All of this is a long way of saying that in its way Schoenberg's orchestration is quite faithful to Brahms' music, and once you get past the enthusiastic brass and kooky percussion, what really stands out is the clarity of the part-writing, the result of a handling of the woodwind section that really is more Schoenberg than Brahms. Certainly this is one of the most striking elements in Robert Craft's now-legendary recording of this work, one in which he has the Chicago Symphony playing the living daylights out of the music.

Questions of musicological rigor aside, this also is the most physically exciting account of the work yet made, with a finale not even topped by Craft's remake (for Koch). Of course, there have been many other recordings since this one, including fine ones by Dohnanyí, Järvi, and Eschenbach, and those enjoy more modern sonics; but if you only have room for one version of this piece, then this is it. The addition of the Bach/Schoenberg and Schubert/Webern orchestrations, all very well done, only seals the deal. A classic returns! [10/9/2006]