This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg.

Johannes Brahms composed his Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, between 1856 and 1861. It is understandable why Schoenberg was eager to orchestrate it. The quartet is a dramatic and expansive chamber work. It is made up of four movements, culminating in the famous “Rondo alla Zingarese.” Clara Schumann, Brahms’s lifelong friend and confidante, had described the piano quartet as “symphonic in breadth and power.” According to her, the quartet’s length (almost 50 minutes), the weight of its four movements and the sheer intensity of the piano part went beyond the intimate scope of chamber music.

The quartet premiered in Hamburg in 1861, with Clara herself playing the piano part in subsequent performances. Even before Schoenberg, musicians had made attempts to turn the quartet into a symphonic work. Friedrich Hermann (a Leipzig violinist and arranger) ...

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss U.S. Security of State Marco Rubio's visit to Israel, and what that demonstrates about the Trump administration's real attitude toward Israel's attack on Doha, Qatar, an act that had supposedly enraged the president himself.

Oy vey, Fritz
Teary Merz declares ‘war’ on antisemitism

Friedrich Merz grew visibly emotional at the commemoration of a rebuilt synagogue in Munich last night. The Reichenbachstrasse shul was all but destroyed in the Nazi pogroms of 1938. The German chancellor praised the building as "an expression of Jewish vitality in Germany."

Recalling the memoirs of the woman who initiated the reconstruction, Merz cited her haunting childhood question: “Had no one helped the Jews?”

Merz said he was “appalled” by a resurgence of antisemitism in Germany, calling “Never again” both a duty and a promise. He argued that his country had too often ignored how many newcomers arrived from places where antisemitism is “a state doctrine.”

“From this place I declare war, on behalf of the entire German government, on every form of old and new antisemitism in Germany,” Merz said.

https://x.com/jimmy_dore/status/1967704109668241777?s=46&t=X1kFrd4uChbVMyqYJDzuAQ

Scoop: At a congress in Amsterdam next month, the Party of European Socialists will permanently exclude Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer party, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Smer has been suspended from the umbrella alliance of Europe’s centre-left parties since October 2023, when Fico formed a coalition with a nationalist partner. Now, after months of cosying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, while dismantling institutions and curbing media at home, the socialists have had enough.

The expulsion, expected to be ratified in mid-October, will leave Fico more isolated at the European level, with no route back into the mainstream where he once happily resided. In Brussels and Strasbourg, his lawmakers already operate on the margins of the Parliament, and he has frustrated EU efforts to sanction Russia and reduce reliance on Moscow’s energy.

Smer’s social-democratic coalition partner Hlas will remain suspended, one of the people said. The ...