Nothing for Brahms in earlier days was more momentous than the reception he received from Robert and Clara Schumann when turning up on their Dusseldorf doorstep—on the strength of an introduction from his recently found friend, Joachim—as an unknown youth of 20 with a pile of manuscripts under his arm. The climax of the stay could well have been that evening when the 22-year-old Joachim himself arrived to partner Clara in a brand new sonata corporately written for him, as a surprise, by Schumann, his pupil Albert Dietrich, and of course Brahms too, who contributed a then characteristically burly Scherzo. Amoyal and Roge begin with this youthful Scherzo, which gives their 75-minute-long Decca disc its special claim for attention. Their main rivals, old and new, offer only the three sonatas for which, rather surprisingly, Brahms made Joachim and Clara wait for more than a quarter of a century.
Recorded in Walthamstow Assembly Hall, the two Frenchmen come over with crystalline clarity. The piano in fact has a bell-like ring which only in one or two of the bigger fortissimos of the Third Sonata acquires just a suspicion of clang. Predictably from two such eminently cultivated musicians, their playing inspires complete confidence for its unaffected directness and truth. In all four works I felt I was enjoying the traditional, classically orientated Brahms in clear morning light, without special pleading of any kind. But I would have liked a touch more urgency from the violin in the C minor Scherzo's accentuation.
Though differences are far from extreme, the slightly swifter tempos chosen by Osostowicz and Tomes for the faster movements of all three sonatas results in greater melodic liquidity, which coupled with the hypersensitive suppleness of Osostowicz's phrasing somehow evokes a more romantically impressionable and vulnerable Brahms, a Brahms his closer friends might have encountered in the later half-lights of the day. Tomes in her turn is even more attentive to detail than Roge, whether in the context of harmonic surprise, hidden melody, or variety of touch, so as to present a composer no less interested in textural colour than constructional cunning. Their interplay is subtle enough to suggest that for both artists, these performances were a revelatory voyage of discovery. And without any wearing of heart-on-sleeve they certainly make nonsense of the charge that Brahms could never exult. He himself I'm sure would have loved the playfulness they bring to the contrasts of the third movement of the last sonata, and even the middle movement of the second, where slow movement and Scherzo are compressed into one. But this A major Sonata surely needs a slightly more positive launching, than it gets here. We're not told where the well-balanced Hyperion recording was made: its mellowness and reverberance (the latter not always to the piano's good) suggest a church.
In sum, two most welcome additions to the catalogue in their different ways. But that said, I can only remind readers that for sheer romantic succulence of tone and expression in the three sonatas, Perlman can never be forgotten in splendid partnership with Ashkenazy (EMI), nor can Suk's silken song and finesse (Decca), even though he is sometimes overpowered by that ardently devoted Brahmsian, Katchen.'