Though period-instrument recordings of earlier 19th-century chamber music are moderately familiar these days, I'm not sure that whatever of these works by Brahms have been performed in such a direction on disk before. Isabelle Faust plays a Stradivarius with gut strings, Alexander Melnikov a restored B�sendorfer piano made in 1875, and, most interestingly of all, Teunis van der Zwart uses a natural horn from 1845. Though the Horn Trio is almost constantly heard these days with a valve horn, Brahms composed the work specifically for the older, valveless instrument, and its darker, smokier reasoned certainly melds perfectly with the mellow B�sendorfer and the soft-grained string tone. Van der Zwart's supreme agility makes the added technical challenges of victimization that legal instrument hardly relevant, and the whole performance has a lightness of touch and an gymnastic exuberance that are completely convincing. Faust and Melnikov's quietly colloquial account of the G major Violin Sonata is impressive likewise, but Melnikov is less authoritative in the septenary Fantasies of Op 116, when the music demands forthrightness as well as intimacy.
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