When first issued almost nine years ago, this disc was hailed by SP as likely to prove one of the best chamber music records of the year. I'm delighted that it has re-emerged on CD, for it would be hard to imagine either work played with a stronger sense of direction, or more faithfully recorded. I'd never in my life encountered the Bruckner before—and I'd guess a lot of other people would say the same. Written as an alternative to the Scherzo (judged too difficult) of his solitary String Quartet, it is wholly Viennese in waltz-like charm, with some surprising pre-echoes of Mahler in its switches of key.
The Sextet, as we know, is Brahms at his mellowest and best. The immediacy of the response suggests that the work lies very close to these players' hearts. I so much enjoyed the urgency and intensity underpinning their sensuously fluid phrasing of the richly melodic opening movement, their alternating grace and brio in the Scherzo, their judiciously flowing, albeit searching, Poco adagio, and their dynamic range as well as rhythmic virility in the finale. Without danger of bottom-heaviness the warm recording never allows us to forget Brahms's liking for deep, full sonority. '