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September 15, 2025
The Gaggle Music Club: Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, As Orchestrated By Arnold Schoenberg

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) made an orchestral version of the “Rondo alla Zingarese.” It became a popular orchestral encore piece in the late 19th century.

Schoenberg admired Brahms's music, and indeed took inspiration from it. Schoenberg in particular heaped praise on what he termed Brahms’s “developing variation” technique. In his 1933 essay "Brahms the Progressive," Schoenberg identified this technique as one that allows new musical material to be continuously generated by way of variation on an initial idea, rather than by way of introduction of unrelated new themes. So instead of writing a melody, then contrasting it with something brand new, Brahms takes a small motif and spins the whole piece out of its transformation. Somewhat unexpectedly, Schoenberg considered Brahms to be a “progressive” composer, a kind of spiritual forefather of modernism.

Schoenberg orchestrated the quartet in 1937. At the time, he was living as an exile in the United States, teaching at University of California, Los Angeles, and conducting orchestras. He had limited access to string quartets or piano quartet ensembles, and wanted to find a way to present the Brahms work to orchestral audiences.

Following the premiere, some critics accused Schoenberg of “modernizing” Brahms against his will. Others argued that the orchestration was entirely in sympathy with Brahms’s spirit, revealing textures that the piano part could only suggest. Schoenberg gave Brahms a full woodwind section, brass and percussion. The orchestration is especially vivid in the last movement (Rondo alla Zingarese), which becomes a kind of orchestral showpiece with Hungarian-gypsy color, in the style of Kodály or Bartók.

Today, Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg, is considered one of the finest examples of “reimagining” chamber music for orchestra, alongside Mahler’s re-orchestrations of Beethoven and Schumann. It has entered the symphonic repertoire, often played by orchestras that want both Brahms’s passion and Schoenberg’s orchestral brilliance.

In this performance from 2017, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony is conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.

00:48:43
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The Gaggle Music Club: Dvořák’s Cello Concerto In B Minor

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (B. 191). First performed in 1896, the concerto is one of the masterpieces of the late Romantic era--a work at once epic in scope, symphonic in conception and intensely personal in emotional content.

Dvořák had been reluctant to write a cello concerto. He considered the cello unsuitable as a solo instrument, believing its upper register was too nasal and its lower register too muffled to project over an orchestra. This judgment came from experience. As a violist and orchestral player himself, he knew the practical balance issues.

In 1892, Dvořák accepted an invitation from Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, to become director of the conservatory. His assignment was to help develop an authentically American classical music that incorporated folk and African-American idioms. During this American sojourn, he composed the majestic Symphony No. 9 in E minor, ...

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October 06, 2025
Monday Night At The Movies: "Solaris" (1972)

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TG 1982: The 25-Year-Anniversary Of The Belgrade Coup

George Szamuely sat down for a long conversation with Serbian diplomat and political analyst Vladimir Krsljanin recalling Oct. 5, 2000, the day on which the legal government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was overthrown, inaugurating the era of Western-inspired color revolutions.

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Neocon Protests in Georgia are Failing (again) | Lasha Kasradze

Neutrality Studies

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9,623 views Oct 7, 2025 Interviews

Protesters are trying to storm the Presidential Palace in Tbilisi, but why now? With the ruling party winning another decisive victory in local elections, what is truly fueling this unrest? To make sense of it all, today I’m talking again to my colleague and friend Lasha Kasradze, a geopolitical analyst and Liaison officer for Sokhumi State University in the United States. We dive into how Georgia’s government weathered intense foreign pressure, using its new transparency law to push back against outside influence. From there, we zoom out to the shifting fault lines in the region—Moldova’s turn towards the West and the strategic dismemberment of Armenia. We dissect Trump's ambitious Zangezur corridor plan, questioning if it’s a shrewd economic project or a militarized "poison pill" in disguise. Finally, ...

Visiting relatives in Holland …

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January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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