Raff Piano Quartets from Divox

[Alan Howe]

Tadaaaa! Mark, take a bow!
Raff's Piano Quartets, two of his greatest works, have been announced for release by Divox...
http://www.mdt.co.uk/MDTSite/product/NR_July11/CDX209056.htm

[TerraEpon]

Expensive though....,


I just yesterday bought the quintets disc actually (which was apparently reissued to a much wider disribution earlier this year). Hopefully the new one will show up on Amazon in due time too, though.

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks, Alan. Whilst I had a hand in getting the new Piano Quartets recording made in the first place, I've had no technical or artistic input and so feel sufficiently objective to be able to review it at raff.org. If you don't want to spend five minutes reading a torrent of praise, suffice to say that not only are these tremendous works but they receive tremendous, award-worthy performances. The sound is excellent too, but I imagine that the higher cost of the CD is down to the fact that it's a hybrid SACD.

I'll be very interested to see what other people think of it when they get their hands on it.

[Peter1953]

We have to be patience for a month or so. But those audio extracts, inserted in your very informative review Mark, sound so promising. Sometimes it's difficult to wait, but Raffians are very patient music lovers.
BTW, I still wonder whether a person can really distinguish a hybrid SCAD from a normal recording if you are older than, let's say, 40 years. I've always understood that when you're getting older your ears cannot differentiate high frequency tones any more. We'll, that's a different question. For now it's time to give Raff's Piano Quintet another spin.

[Peter1953]

I have a rather silly question. Two such important Piano Quartets, each one lasting over half an hour. What could be the reason that Raff didn't give both quartets a separate opus number instead of Op. 202 No.1 and Op. 202 No.2? (I'm aware of the fact that this isn't the only example.)

[Mark Thomas]

Peter, I can't answer that question fully because, bottom, line, I just don't know. What I can say is that only a couple of years earlier he had published no less than three string quartets (Nos.6-8, including the famous Seventh - Die Schöne Müllerin) as his Op.192. So he'd done it before on an even bigger scale.

Quite why he did it, I can only guess at and my guess boils down to the fact that Raff was a very different sort of composer to Brahms. Brahms would worry away at a composition for years, sometimes decades. He'd destroy whole movements and every scrap of working material, so that all that survived was his final thoughts. Raff, on the other hand, would rather compose another piece in the same genre if the one which he was working on didn't answer fully whatever inner compulsion had triggered the urge to write a work. This is especially true in chamber music: there's an earlier set of three string quartets (opp.136-8) written one after another, as were the Third and Fourth Piano Trios, the Third and Fourth Violin Sonatas and the first three piano suites. One could even cite the two symphonies of 1876: the Spring and Winter Symphonies. Not that Raff was like Rubinstein and wrote in a stream of consciousness manner, moving quickly and uncritically right on to the next piece, never revisiting, refining or amending a work. No, he was just a very hard worker.

So it seems that if he was, say, in a Piano Trio frame of mind, he could well have too many ideas to fit in one work and would just carry on and write another to say something slightly different. In the case of the three string quartets op.192, they are all effectively suites and I suspect that for him  they were the result of his competing conceptions of a suite for string quartet. Similarly, the two Piano Quartets are yin and yang: one basically light-hearted, the other much more troubled. Raff, it seems to me, had waited a long time to get around to writing them and, when the mood finally took him, he found that he had to write two to get all his conflicting ideas down on paper.

Why under the same opus number? Well, he was never at all commercially minded, in fact he was a financial innocent. Also, he never really understood how his reputation suffered if he flooded the market with compositions - something which Liszt warned him about as early as the 1840s. What he should have done was allow one of the Piano Quartets to be published, let it establish itself and then publish the other one a few years later and see it eagerly taken up by a public eager for more. Instead, he most likely let himself be persuaded by a greedy publisher to part with them both in one go for a song, giving them the same opus number because they were written at the same time. He was quite guileless and, although he was keen to see his works succeed, was otherwise uninterested in them once they were published. He never retained his manuscripts, didn't understand that they had both monetary and historical value

That doesn't fully answer the question I know, Peter, but it's the best I can do.

[TerraEpon]

He's hardly the only composer to do these things -- maybe more rare by Raff's time, but just look at Beethoven's output -- or hell Reicha's, with three opera of six half hour plus wind quintets each.

[Mark Thomas]

Oh no, by no means unique and I don't think I claimed that. Unusual by the third quarter of the century though, and something which contributed to his reputation for un-selfcritical over-production.

[Peter1953]

Thanks very much, Mark, for your extensive and interesting post. Although the reason why is not known, you have given some plausible possibilities. BTW, how consequent was Raff giving opus numbers to his completed works? Was he the only person who gave opus numbers to his works or were others involved as well (publishers, family, colleague composers). What fascinates me is that Raff created wonderful music but didn't commercialize his works. A true artist, someone who isn't constantly thinking of money making. That makes him sympathetic to me.

[Alan Howe]

I'll leave Mark to answer Peter's question; all I want to add here is that this CD ought to be a mandatory purchase for Raffians. IMHO the two Piano Quartets are as good as anything Raff ever wrote and really must rank as two of the peaks of the 19th century chamber music repertoire. Their neglect is simply a scandal. What's more they are works on a large scale, with both clocking in at just under forty minutes, so there's much to enjoy - and a very well filled CD!

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks Alan. I can only agree with all you say!

Peter, once again no one now knows the answer to your question definitely, but I'm fairly sure that it was Raff who decided upon a work's opus number, at least initially. Although the number of surviving Raff manuscripts is few, most have opus numbers written in his hand. There are a couple where the number written by Raff on the manuscript differs from that with which it was finally published (the Second Symphony, for example), or where a work was left unpublished by Raff (e.g. the Thüringian Suite) but had an opus number written by him on the score. So I think, but cannot prove, that Raff was generally responsible but no doubt there are instances where a publisher prevailed upon him to change them.

[Peter1953]

The CD is now available, see here. Immediately ordered...

[Peter1953]

What a wonderful Piano Quartets, and so vividly performed. A lot of "Allegro's" in the in total 8 movements, of which the 2nd movement of the first Quartet, an Allegro molto, "puts a lot of music into every minute". This is great chamber music and again evidence that Raff was a very, very fine composer.
Is it Raff's best chamber music for piano and strings? I cannot say that (yet), simply because I also like his Piano Quintet so much, just like his Piano Trios.
If you like this genre, I strongly recommend this disc. Really a must-buy.

[Mark Thomas]

I'm delighted that you like these two big works, Peter. Personally, on the grounds of the consistency of inspiration, the quality of the material and their sheer inventiveness, I put them both up there with the Piano Quintet, the First String Quartet and the first two Piano Trios as amongst his best chamber music.

[Peter1953]

Is it really a fact that Raff wasn't such a virtuoso at the piano? I listened again to both Piano Quartets op. 202 this evening and paid special attention to the piano part. It's just amazing. What a brilliance, and it's all functional. I suppose Raff played the piano part himself while composing or during a performance of the quartet. Hats off!
Even Rubinstein and Henselt could have learned something from Raff's magical piano scores.