The three diverse works in this program exemplify a burgeoning composer's successful quest in mastering a given genre—a mastery that in the case of the painfully self-critical Brahms was hard won. With 20/20 hindsight, we know that the string trio was for Beethoven a sort of apprenticeship: the five works he gave us in this medium were all spawned in the space of less than two years (1796-97), when the composer was 26 years old, and—with the arrangement for string quartet of his Op. 14 No. 1 Piano Sonata—served as preparation for his first major set of string quartets, Op. 18. After publication of those works in 1801, he never wrote another string trio. Each of Beethoven's string trios boasts its own unique character, with the first patterned after Mozart's Divertimento in E-Flat, K.563. The others are all shorter (though Op. 8, a serenade, is in eight brief movements). The Op.9 trios are in the more orthodox four movements. The second of the set commences with an Allegretto followed by the slow movement, a menuetto and a rondo. Beethoven may have been experimenting, but his writing in the string trios is utterly masterful and self-possessed. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to believe that these full-blooded, almost orchestral sonorities are being produced by only three instruments. The Brahms Piano Quartet shares its C minor tonality with that composer's First Symphony: it shares other qualities with that work as well—most notably, a painful and extended gestation period. In April 1856 Brahms apparently showed the manuscript of a three-movement piano quartet in C-sharp minor to Joseph Joachim. A letter of Joachim's from a few weeks later mentions the work and quotes some of its thematic material. Thus we learn that this long-vanished composition was in fact an early version of Op. 60. The C Minor Piano Quartet, then, is something of a stylistic hybrid—with two of its movements in Brahms's youthful Sturm und Drang manner and two in the more reserved style of his middle years. The outer movements are easy enough to identify—they demonstrate the dichotomy between early and later Brahms. The first movement, a revision and transposition of the 1856 composition's beginning, is clearly akin to his First Piano Concerto in its ardent, smoldering vehemence. Even the ostensibly lyrical second theme resembles the concerto's counterpart in stride and exultation. The flowing Finale, on the other hand, navigates by way of a figuration right out of the finale of the Violin/Piano Sonata, Op.78—as typical an example of sedate "middle" Brahms as can be found. The Scherzo, however, is a puzzler. Although Brahms inserted this interlude at a late date, its style earmarks it as the earliest movement of all. This demonic, even obsessive movement, with its fearsome leaps in the piano part, is right out of the world that produced the youthful Op.4 Scherzo for piano. Could Brahms have merely been recalling an earlier idea? Or was he making a conscious effort to match his erstwhile stylistic fingerprints? The Andante is also a reworking of the 1856 score. Brahms was very much under Schumann's spell when he conceived the unforgettably beautiful cello solo that begins this section. Whereas the Beethoven trio and parts of the Brahms quartet represent their respective composers' early periods, the Schubert C Major Fantasie is the last—and certainly the most highly developed—of his works for violin and piano. Unlike many of the other great composers, Schubert was not a virtuoso performer; nor did his intimate circle include international celebrities who were. But, like its stylistic sibling, the Wanderer Fantasie for piano, the C major work presents both violinist and pianist with some of the most fearsomely difficult writing ever conceived for either instrument. The Fantasie is in a single, uninterrupted span—its various movements linked together organically in the manner that Liszt later familiarized in his B Minor Piano Sonata. Its introduction suggests a sunrise, the piano providing a backdrop of shimmering tremolandos against which the violin soars with poignant intensity. A Paganini-like Allegretto follows in which the main idea is subjected to canonic treatment. The Andantino is the centerpiece of the work: an elaborate theme-and-variations treatment of his song Sei mir gegrüßt. Schubert momentarily reflects upon the opening tremolando idea and then moves into a coda based on the song, which returns in even more exposed form before plunging into the final Presto. The influence of Paganini has been cited above, but an even more traceable characteristic of the writing is Schubert's use of trills, broken-octave filigree and high-position melodic playing, which clearly echo Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata. In the 1950s Heifetz greatly reduced his touring, but continued to indulge his voracious appetite for chamber music. One of his projects was the performance and recording of the five Beethoven string trios with William Primrose and Gregor Piatigorsky. Op.9 No.2 was the last to be recorded. Five years later, with pianist Jacob Lateiner, violinist Sanford Schonbach and again Piatigorsky, he collaborated in this unusually stringent, forward pressing account of the Brahms quartet. The Schubert Fantasie dates from the penultimate formal Heifetz recording session. —Harris Goldsmith