Brahms and his clarinet trio

I have read over a bio of Brahms, titiled "Brahms, His Life and Work", by Karl Geiringer. It is a translation version. The author is famous for his critics in music and for this book. The original book was written in 1950s and has earned good reputation as one of the best bio of this composer. Different from the previous bios by other authors, Geiringer was allowed to access to more than 1000 mails from or to Brahms, which had belonged to Vienna Wiener Musikverein, and could write his bio with much deeper and broader knowledge of his life.  

According to this book, Brahms has made conflicts or quarrels with close friends, such as Joachim, Von Buelow or even Clara Schumann. He seemed to be a character of sarcasm and misanthropy while he found it most valuable to have good friends. In his work "Alto Rhapsody" after a poem by Goethe, that ambivalence was clearly expressed. In his last years of life, however, he has reconciled with most of them even if not perfectly. 

Geiringer wrote of him in the last years as follows;

Brahms was immersed in a kind of resignation in serenity. He won't be so sarcastic or acrimonious to others as before. He has become more thoughtful to others. 

In the works such as Clarinet Trio OP114, we could hear what he thought of life in its very last chapter. Of course, his masterpiece in that time was Clarinet Quintet OP115. Together with it, this trio was an expression of his feeling of resignation on things and still a passion to life through that. The more pessimistic his attitude was, the more passionate he was for life. What an ambivalence! Music is such an art which could express complicated feelings for life.

I used to listen to this piece at a small concert at a hall of a temple near to my mother school. It was an afternoon in a weekend. I can't remember what has brought me there. The cellist was Sumiko Kurata in her young days, who has achieved a position of leading performer in solo and chamber music after being taught by Tortelier. It was one of the moments shivering my spine up, which I have seldom experienced in my life, when she played the 1st motif of the 1st movement in the recapitulation on C string.

I happened to know of this performance. The clarinet part is replaced by viola. An impressive and excellent performance. If you won't get absorbed by their performance straightforwardly appealing to our mind, you would never understand Brahms.

 https://youtu.be/IDmhnGBRijQ