For some reason, I listened one day to a Sextet by Brahms.
Sextets are strange animals. A quartet is a well-defined, well-established musical form, written for the instrument ensemble called a string quartet: 2 violins, a viola, a cello. Both the genius and the failing of a string quartet is the fact that the four instruments sound so similar. It's tonally homogenious. The string quartet is the godfather of all small ensembles, but I suspect the genre is dying from its own popularity.
Someone got the idea of writing for a string quintet; they just added a viola. The two violins were called first violin and second violin, and the violas were first viola and second viola. There are a very few great string quintets, including Boccherini's famous quintet, of whose minuet is famous.
Brahms decided to write a set of string sextets; these had, in addition to the two violins and two violas, two cellos (or celli). The one I like the most, and probably the first one I listened to, is the one in B Flat. Here is a link to one on YouTube:
This recording is, I think, the very one I first listened to. I had been a member of a 'mailing list', a sort of music discussion group, and one of the guys said he was trying to get rid of his vinyl records in favor of CDs, and offered his discs for free. Of course I jumped at the chance, and one of the items I got was a boxed set of the Brahms sextets.
The lovely thing about this piece was how it sounds like a discussion among friends. This is a characteristic of most of the best string ensemble pieces.
OK, I don't have much more to say about this piece. You might want to listen to a different recording of the same piece, and see if you like it better.
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