The Stratton String Quartet:
George Stratton (violin)
Carl Taylor (violin)
Watson Forbes (viola)
John Moore (violoncello)
In the spring of 1875 Brahms worked at, among other works, the B flat Quartet, Op. 67, which is the most gracious of his three works in this form. Walter Niemann calls it Brahms's ' Pastoral Quartet', for everything about the music proclaims it to be pastoral: first, the character of the themes which are ' brief nature-motifs of a pastorally idyllic, naive, and comically humorous kind, as, for instance, in the lively " horn-calls in triplets " of the principal subject in the first movement '. Nevertheless, like the C minor Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1, there is a definitely tragi,' quality about the music, but, as Sir Donald Tovey points out, it ' has abundance of relief, the second subject of the first movement being one of the mo'st attractive and graceful passages Brahms ever wrote '.