In his 2009 essay ‘Whose Brahms Is It Anyway?’, Walter Frisch, founding president of the American Brahms Society, bemoans the trend that recorded performances of Brahms’s slow movements have become progressively slower since World War Two.Footnote ¹ Frisch attributes this phenomenon to the development of a ‘sonic image of the ponderous, weighty Brahms – corresponding perhaps to the familiar visual image of the fat man with the beard and cigar’.Footnote ² The ‘brooding Brahms’, to borrow Hans von Bülow’s expression, is not Frisch’s Brahms.Footnote ³

Tempo is obviously not the only culprit for the ponderous and weighty sound we may hear in performances of Brahms’s music. The other main factor, as Wallace Berry would argue, is articulation (including all of its manifestations in dynamics and texture).Footnote ⁴ Our modern ears are accustomed to Brahms portrayed with lush melodic weavings and rich harmonic sonorities. The oft-cited portrait of Brahms as a composer deeply concerned with organic structure may have further fueled the thickening of sound, as performers seek to do justice to many motivic and contrapuntal details and their organic role within the whole.Footnote ⁵

Against this backdrop, the performance of Brahms’s piano trios by Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt offers a commendable response to Frisch’s plea. Even a quick sampling of the recording draws attention to their distinctive approach to the Brahmsian sound. The tone of the strings is notably ‘clean’ and ephemeral as a result of their judicious use of vibrato and marked execution of tapering. The piano, while maintaining close partnership with the strings, projects nevertheless a noticeably wide variety of dynamics and timbre. As a whole, the ensemble injects an intimate vocal quality to the phraseology and a heightened sense of narrativity to the form. Their Brahms, in short, cannot be farther removed from the caricature Frisch has in mind.

Readers familiar with the work of Christian Tetzlaff, the violinist of the trio, will find my impression hardly surprising. In an interview with The New Yorker, Tetzlaff has made clear his personal antagonism toward the modern preoccupation with the lush tone: ‘The listener loses the ear for the most beautiful sounds if they’ve been used for arbitrary, non-important things.’Footnote ⁶ Jeremy Eichler, the author of the interview-article, captions Tetzlaff’s picture with perhaps one of Tetzlaff’s most iconoclastic statements, which he purportedly made to a room of music students: ‘Beauty is the enemy of expression.’ In Eichler’s assessment, this motto leads Tetzlaff to ‘[refuse] to embrace what might be called the School of the Big Tone: the broad, velvety sound, sustained with uniformly wide vibrato, that many listeners in the age of Itzhak Perlman have come to think is how a violin should sound.’

My brief critique here will focus on how a snippet of the ensemble’s performance of Brahms’s Piano Trio in B major op. 8 – an intriguing amalgam of both the precocious and the mature Brahms – readily exegetes Tetzlaff’s doctrine. Right from the outset, the opening period involving the piano and cello already divulges the ensemble’s unique musical persona. Vogt’s opening tempo is flowing with a subtle hint of urgency, his phrasing of the four-bar antecedent phrase remarkably simple, almost nonchalant. Tanja Tetzlaff’s delivery of the consequent phrase, while echoing Vogt’s simplicity, exemplifies the sensitive and nuanced playing that is to persist throughout. Entering in a subdued, timid voice, Tetzlaff effortlessly emboldens her tone at the local apexes to enhance the contour and dynamic profile of the two-bar motives.Footnote ⁷ This emphasis on local climaxes is far from formulaic; Tetzlaff responds perceptively to the diverse tonal meanings of the climaxes by differentiating the colours of chord tones and appoggiaturas. An especially poignant instance of her delicate phrasing is when she reverses the correlation between contour and dynamic, articulating the climax of the entire first paragraph in bar 17 with an exquisite and unexpected subito piano. While most performers underline this melodic high point with overt portamento and vibrato, Tetzlaff’s reversal here allows the last phrase of the first paragraph to develop artlessly into the first arrival of tutti in bar 20. As the whole ensemble proceeds from here onward, we hear the violin and cello in their tightly coordinated choreography, portraying in unison (figuratively speaking) the ebb and flow of Brahms’s melodic shapes and harmonic trajectories with transparency and purpose.

According to Christian Tetzlaff and some of his collaborators, this violinist is not afraid to produce an unusual, even offensive sound on his instrument, if that is what he believes the music requires. A case in point in the first movement of op. 8 is the Tetzlaffs’ treatment of the secondary theme. The long thirds and sixths that lurk behind the piano melody eerily resemble double stops on a Renaissance viol; the ensuing lyrical tune cast in parallel octaves transports us even further back to the sacred polyphony of medieval organum. In the last expanded phrase of the secondary theme, which sees the piano surging sequentially in search of a cadential conclusion, the Tetzlaffs remain hauntingly pure and restrained in their tone even as the music continues to intensify toward the conclusion of the exposition.Footnote ⁸

Is this not evidence for ‘[failing to] convey a sense of involvement or affection’, as one reviewer has criticized the Tetzlaffs’ earlier portrayal of Schumann’s piano trios?Footnote ⁹ We may not know for certain the Tetzlaffs’ rationale for their interpretation, but their provocative approach to the secondary theme poses integral questions about Brahms’s form, and thereby challenges the listener to ponder the aesthetic and narrative implications of the performers’ choice. A source of insights is Nicholas Cook’s 1999 article on Brahms’s revision of the Trio and its potential pertinence to performance.Footnote ¹⁰ Cook notices that the secondary theme, initially in G-sharp minor, makes repeated attempts to swerve back to B major. The last expanded phrase seems to be well on its way to a close in B major, but returns to G-sharp minor at the very last moment. For Cook, this enclosure of B major within the G-sharp-minor theme poses a performance question:

The Tetzlaffs offer yet a third option: they underplay the B-major material, so that the return of G-sharp minor sounds not so much like a rescue, but more as an unwelcomed realization of an earlier premonition. The interpolation of B major, where the string octaves are imbued with a spiritual nakedness by the Tetzlaffs’ tone, becomes in this context the personification of the timid protagonist from the beginning of the movement, who quietly longs here for relief but to no avail. As we will find out later, the menacing G-sharp-minor conclusion of the exposition turns out to be a foretaste of the full-blown outcry of despair in the last movement, where Brahms’s formidable chromatic essay is vividly portrayed by Vogt’s explosive octaves and the Tetzlaffs’ much edgier tone. The Big Tone is finally here – not to satisfy, but to unsettle and move.

As a musician, Christian Tetzlaff considers himself to be primarily in the business of understanding the composer’s soul: ‘I deal in Berg’s soul, in Brahms’s soul—that’s my job. And, you can challenge me, but I find that music is humans’ most advanced achievement, more so than painting and writing, because it’s more mysterious, more magical, and it acts in such a direct way.’Footnote ¹² The fat man with the cigar, as it turns out, is relating through the trio’s musical persona his spiritual journey, one that encapsulates human struggle and hope. Vogt’s and the Tetzlaffs’ Brahms, in this sense, is our Brahms. I am hopeful that listeners, Frisch included, will hear much more of an intimate and intense soul-dealing than a simple sonic indulgence in the brooding Brahms in this remarkable performance by three deeply musical souls.