Brahms: String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1

New recordings by the Takács Quartet on Hyperion have become important landmarks in the musical calendar. This second disc of Brahms string quartets looks set to repeat all the commercial and critical success of their first.

It took twenty years for the famously self-critical Brahms to release his Op 51 string quartets for publication. Despite frequent requests, they were held back until they had reached his requisite standard of perfection. It is clear that Brahms’s struggle with the string quartet medium eventually led him to find an intensely personal language for it, with an unmistakable originality of melody and texture. Op 51 No 1 is both suffused with great musical richness and organically unified, with each idea growing with unerring logic out of the last in a process of continual development, and the main subject of each movement clearly arising out of the same germ.

Having hesitated so long over his first two string quartets, Brahms managed to produce their successor, Op 67, without any protracted birth-pangs, and the fact that the new work was dedicated to a well-known physician prompted him to elaborate on the medical analogy. ‘I am’, he told Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann (the husband of the pianist Emma Brandes, and himself a keen amateur cellist) ‘publishing a string quartet, and may need a doctor for it (as with the first ones). This quartet rather resembles your wife—very dainty, but brilliant! … It’s no longer a question of a forceps delivery; but of simply standing by. There’s no cello solo in it, but such a tender viola solo that you may want to change your instrument for its sake!’

The string quartets of Brahms demonstrate his perfectionism: he wrote dozens of works in the genre, but rejected all but three, and worked at the first one for twenty long years before publishing it. Even the famous Piano Quintet Op. 34 was rewritten several times for various formations before it was published in its final version, whose achievement is today undisputed. These works stepped out of Beethoven's shadow to take a firm place in musical history.

Since its formation in Madrid in 1997, Cuarteto Casals has achieved recognition as one of Europe's most distinguished string quartets.The group came to public attention when it won first prize at both the 2000 London International Competition and the 2002 Brahms International Competition. It now performs regularly in the finest halls in London, Paris, Berlin,Vienna, Zurich,Amsterdam, Madrid, New York and Tokyo, and has appeared at such festivals as Salzburg and Lucerne.The quartet has accompanied the King of Spain on state visits and performed at the Royal Palace of Madrid on the royal family's set of matched Stradivarius instruments. Cuarteto Casals was honoured in 2005 with the Prize of the City of Barcelona, in 2006 with the Spanish National Music Award and in 2008 with the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. Claudio Martínez Mehner studied in Madrid, Moscow, Freiburg, Como and Baltimore with Joaquín Soriano, Dmitri Bashkirov,Vitalij Margulis and Leon Fleisher. He has won first prizes in international competitions at Saragossa and Milan and at the Fondation Chimay (Belgium). For many years now he has performed extensively as both soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Brahms laboured long and hard over the composition of his string quartets but the effort paid off in abundance with resulting masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. The Auryn Quartet were formed in 1981.They have an exclusive contract with TACET and have recorded music by Beethoven, Haydn and Britten, receiving many awards and international critical acclaim.