From the left, Field Marshall Brooke who Churchill described as "a hard headed Ulsterman", General Simpson, Churchill and Field Marshall Montgomery. I am not certain but I think Norman Dankelmann was responsible for this picture. From the left, Field Marshall Brooke who Churchill described as "a hard headed Ulsterman", General Simpson, Churchill and Field Marshall Montgomery. I am not certain but I think Norman Dankelmann was responsible for this picture.After the failure of his first piano concerto, Johannes Brahms turned to chamber music to relearn his craft and win back the audience he had lost with that musical shipwreck. His first effort, the Opus 18 sextet, tried to solve the formal problem of a sextet. That genre consists of two violins, two violas and two cellos, which makes the ensemble bottom heavy. With everybody playing a the same time, Jo concentrates the first violin in the stratosphere so that it can be heard.
By the time he got to his Opus 36 sextet, he had found a different solution to the problem. Now the instruments speak only when they need to. I’m not going to play the pedant here because by now you know a movement in sonata format when you hear it. Just lay back and roll with it. This piece is scheduled for Saturday night.
Brahms: Sextet for Strings in G, Op. 36, first movement
I love the propulsiveness of the rhythm in the fourth movement and the dissonance in the harmonic progressions.
Boy does that picture have a lot of history in it, in the people that were there.