This album brings together two substantial chamber works written some decades apart, but completed, in each case, whilst their composers were on holiday. Of course, ‘holiday’ is a relative term for both men: these were not lazy weeks on sandy beaches, but a change of pace and freedom from city life that offered both time for rest and creative possibilities.  For Johannes Brahms, summers allowed for precious quiet time to compose, walk, swim, eat good food and socialise at leisure. For Franz Schubert, holidays in Steyr, in north-west Austria were part-relaxation, part-networking opportunity thanks to his friend and colleague Johann Michael Vogl, who had been born near the little town. Thus each composer gained space, time and musical rejuvenation in these crucial escapes from the Austrian capital.

Brahms’s third and final Piano Quartet in C minor Op.60 was a piece some decades in the making. When he was still in his early twenties, he wrote a piano quartet in C sharp minor, trying it out in several versions but apparently reaching a creative impasse. In 1873, around two decades later – years in which he had gone from young musical nobody to one of the most widely-respected composers in Western Europe – he returned to the abandoned project and tried to find a new way forward. Working at it over the next year or so, both in Vienna and on his summer break in Rüschlikon on the edge of Lake Zurich, he lowered the key by a semitone to C minor, radically reworked two movements of his original, and composed two new ones to make a set of four. The completed Piano Quartet was premiered in November 1875 and published that same autumn, with Brahms’s skilful revisions rendering almost entirely invisible the joins between old and new material.

It’s clear from the first bars of the piece that this is a work of symphonic ambition, the piano octaves ringing out across the restless sighs of the strings. The proportions of this first movement are grand and sonorous, the themes by turn turbulent and sweetly lyrical. A tautly-wound, almost desperate Scherzo follows before the tension melts away in an Andante of exquisite beauty. Even the finale eventually gives way from its initial restlessness to yield a major-key resolution at the last moment.

Brahms evidently had a particular literary model in mind in relation to this Quartet, most pithily revealed in the he sent to his publisher on finishing the work: ‘On the cover you must have a picture, namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I’ll send you my photograph for the purpose. You can use blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots, since you like colour-printing.’ The figure Brahms depicts here is the hero of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scandalously popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a passionate young man who ultimately kills himself on realising that he can never be with the woman he loves. Though it had been published in the 1770s (and was quickly blamed for seemingly ‘inspiring’ a spate of suicides among young men who had been unlucky in love), Werther remained a hugely influential book – and later opera by Jules Massenet – and as a personality he was familiar to all afficionados of German literature.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, as Goethe reigned supreme in Austro-German culture, Franz Schubert was building a career as one of the very first genuinely freelance musicians living and working in Vienna. Thanks to his vocal skills as a young chorister, he gained admission to the distinguished Stadtkonvikt school – the best education available for non-aristocrats in Vienna – and it was thanks to some of the friends and contacts he made during his school years and immediately after that he came into contact with Johann Michael Vogl, a distinguished opera singer some thirty years Schubert’s senior.

Between 1819 and 1825, Schubert and Vogl spent several summers in Steyr, just down the road from Vogl’s birthplace of Ennsdorf. The singer knew all the cultured music-lovers in the town and organised accommodation and performances during their stay. The most important musical benefactor in Steyr was the civil servant and amateur musician Sylvester Paumgartner, who held regular concerts in his home and was a good wind player and cellist. And it was at Paumgartner’s request that Schubert composed his ‘Trout’ Quintet.

It’s not clear whether it was Paumgartner who suggested that Schubert write for the slightly unusual combination of violin, viola, cello and double bass with piano: the line-up would have been familiar thanks to the slightly older composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, whose music Schubert greatly admired. But Paumgartner was certainly responsible for requesting that Die Forelle D550, the composer’s catchy song of several years earlier, be incorporated as the theme for a set of variations. The Lied – to a text by Schubert’s near-namesake, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart – relates the cold-blooded actions of a fisherman who stirs the mud in a babbling brook to deceive and hook a trout from the water. (Schubert spares us Schubart’s final ‘moral of the story’ verse, in which the action is spelled out as a cautionary tale to warn bright young ladies away from ‘seducers with their fishing rods’!)

The result of uniting such a memorable melody with a rich palette of string instruments and a hearty dose of Austrian sunshine is a gloriously cheerful work in five movements, with a chamber-orchestral richness. The cheerfully skipping Allegro vivace is followed by an elegant Andante and a Scherzo full of bounce and verve. Between this and the graceful finale comes the Forelle variation set, which begins with the strings alone introducing a fractionally altered version of the song, as if tidied and dressed in its best bib and tucker. It is only at the end of the movement that the mischievous chromatic weaving of the trout’s familiar piano accompaniment makes an appearance – as if here, at least, the wily fish may have won the day after all.