In his Memoirs Rubinstein tells us that as a very young boy studying in Berlin, his first all-consuming passion was Brahms. His playing here leaves no doubt that despite the subsequent counter-claims of Chopin, it was a love that never waned His warmth and verve make it hard to believe that the original analogue recordings, though not released in this country until 1972 were in fact made five years earlier when he was just 80. Piano and strings are excellently balanced, and team-work with members of the very ripe-toned Guarneri Quartet could scarcely be more single-minded.
The CD transfer captures all the glow of the playing even if it might be thought just marginally less natural in tone-quality than the much more recent rival CBS version listed above. That, of course, is a very formidable rival by reason of the quite exceptional romantic temperament and almost orchestral range of tone-colour brought by Perahia and his Amadeus colleagues to the G minor work. But anyone who might have thought their phrasing just occasionally too yielding in the first movement, or the string players' line sometimes insufficiently smooth in he bigger swells of the Andante con moto, could well prefer the more continuous flow of Rubinstein and the Guarneri. Moreover, these artists offer not just the G minor work, like their rivals, but also a deeply committed performance of the autobiographical C minor Quartet too, in turn richly affirmative and tender. Its intimate Andante is exquisitely shaded.'