This cycle of Brahms' violin sonatas presents two of the more charismatic artists on the current scene, neither of them particularly known for Brahms. It works quite a bit better than you might expect. In a way pianist Yuja Wang is the star of the show. The Brahms sonatas still carry a trace of the violin sonata's origins with a violin accompanying the keyboard, and it is often the pianist who leads and sets the tone; in many movements Wang establishes a warmth and depth that are a bit out of character with her usual flamboyant style. She then plays nicely off of Kavakos' lyrical lines with her own more urgent style. The deeper logic of these works might be better served by a more neutral approach, but the overall impression is of two distinct personalities in conversation about the music, and that's the chamber music ideal. An added attraction is the presence of the scherzo from the early F-A-E Sonata, a work collaboratively written by Brahms, Schumann, and Albert Dietrich; Brahms' scherzo is a sort of essay in the Beethoven short-short-short long motif, and it allows Wang to really take command. An enjoyable outing that shows Wang, especially, developing talents beyond her comfort zone. Overly closely miked sound detracts from the experience.© TiVo

Arnold Schoenberg called him "Brahms the Progressive". Whilst Johannes Brahms’s musical language and formal cosmos were deeply rooted in the past, by burrowing into the music of Bach and Beethoven he brought forth compositional fabrics of a tight-knit perfection that pointed far into the future. Yet, over years of continuously evolving interpretations, Brahms’s oeuvre has acquired an inappropriate heaviness more likely to conceal the fabric of his music than to unveil the subtle intricacies of its "developing variations", to quote Schoenberg’s term for his compositional method. András Schiff emphasizes precisely this point in his new recording of the two piano concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. These developments, need it be said, are also related to changing performance conditions and transformations in society. But it is not always easy to say where the causal chain began. What is certain is that the growth of a global audience for music – with a corresponding increase in volume levels, larger concert halls and ever more massive ensembles and sturdier instruments – has led to a distorted image of Brahms that cries out for correction. After all, as Schiff puts it, Brahms’s music is "transparent, sensitive, differentiated and nuanced in its dynamics". In order to bring this to light, however, we must recall the performance conditions of Brahms’s day and reconstruct them as best we can. The Meiningen Court Orchestra, one of Europe’s most progressive and highly acclaimed orchestras of the era, and Brahms’s personal favourite (he conducted it in the première of his Fourth Symphony in 1885), consisted at times of no more than 49 musicians with nine first violins. Moreover, the pianos he preferred, mainly built by the firms of Streicher, Bösendorfer and Blüthner, were more limpid in their sound, richer in overtones, and responded to a lighter touch. András Schiff already turned to period instruments on some of his earlier recordings for ECM’s New Series, including his two double albums with Schubert’s late piano works, for which he used a fortepiano built by Franz Brodmann in 1820. He had used the same instrument for his double album with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, contrasting this version with a reading of the same work on a Bechstein grand of 1921. Now Sir András has chosen the conductor-less Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with its period instruments, for his recording of the two Brahms Concertos. And he plays an historic grand piano built by the Leipzig firm of Julius Blüthner in 1859. The result is nothing less than an attempt "to recreate and restore the works, to cleanse the music and to liberate it from the burden of the –often questionable- trademarks of performing tradition". At times the recordings take on the quality of chamber music, as is especially telling in the last two movements of the B-flat Major Concerto, Op. 83. The result is a performance that approaches the original character of the sound, revealing those layers of the works that emphasise the dialogue between soloist and orchestra – and dispelling the preconception that the Second Concerto is a "symphony with piano obbligato". © ECM New Series

This is the debut recording with the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester by conductor Michael Sanderling, who recently ascended to the orchestra's podium as of 2023 when the album appeared. A set of Brahms symphonies, a crowded marketplace slot in the extreme, might seem a bold move in these circumstances, but nobody can accuse Sanderling of merely retreading others' steps. His Brahms is broad, slow, and detailed, seemingly opening the works into an expanded view. One attraction here, and one that could well bring buyers to the set on its own, is the rare Arnold Schoenberg orchestration of Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, that concludes the album. Although all the melodic material in the work is Brahms', the work is quite characteristic of Schoenberg in its rich, brash orchestration. Schoenberg, in explaining why he made this version of a Brahms chamber work, said, "It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved." That statement might serve as well as a general characterization of Sanderling's symphony treatments here. All of his tempos are well on the slow side. The Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, clocks in at well over 46 minutes, perhaps six minutes slower than average for the work. The rest are similarly measured, with exposition repeats adding to the overall heft. Sanderling fills the spaces with orchestral detail. Sample the opening movement of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68, where the slow introduction is atomized into small gestures that do, in his reading, have their parts to play in the music that follows. However, the big tunes, in this symphony's finale and elsewhere, lose some of their impact; the long line is not quite long enough to sustain them. Sanderling is probably at his best in the Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90, with its compact thematic blocks in which he finds unsuspected layers. This new Brahms, also benefiting from the spacious acoustic of the new Orchesterhaus Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, certainly commands attention.© James Manheim /TiVo

The Brahms Analogue title of this release by cellist Leonard Elschenbroich and pianist Alexei Grynyuk does not refer to some abstract concept but is literal; the album was recorded onto analog tape at Abbey Road Studios and then digitally processed. It even bears the old ADD SPARS code. Audio buffs like to claim that old analog LPs had a warmer sound than their modern digital counterparts, and here, listeners can judge for themselves; even on modest sound equipment, the sound is indeed different from the pristine norm of contemporary product. Less publicized has been the fact that the interpretations of Elschenbroich and Grynyuk are distinctive, quite apart from the analog recording. Performances of Brahms, if competently executed, probably differ less than those of works by other composers, but these two players introduce an unusual amount of rhythmic freedom into the composer's two cello sonatas. On one hand, this demands an unusual degree of coordination between cellist and pianist, and Elschenbroich and Grynyuk, a significant developing partnership, show the fruits of long collaboration and lots of detail work on these particular pieces. On the other, listeners may feel that with small details prioritized in this way, the cello sonatas lose a degree of control over the long line. Again, listeners' reactions may reasonably differ. Most, however, will value the final transcriptions for cello and piano of the Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, shorter works where rhythmic freedom is not a problem; these are memorable performances. This is assuredly not the usual Brahms, and listeners are invited to check them out for themselves.© James Manheim /TiVo

In his beautifully written sleeve notes to this late Brahms solo recital from Paul Lewis, Brahms authority Matthias Kornemann draws our attention to the uniqueness of Brahms’s late oeuvre being one that Brahms himself consciously sectioned off from the rest of his output. That having made the unusual decision to cease composing aged 59, driven by the conviction that he had said all he had to say, Brahms was then lured back to his manuscript paper after hearing the playing of clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld and being suddenly possessed of a desire to penetrate, as Arnold Schoenberg put it, to the “uttermost limit of the still-expressible”. And without doubt there is a palpable autumnal quality to the ensuing late period’s works, both for clarinet and for solo piano, because while Brahms on the one hand cleaved resolutely to his faith in absolute music with no programmatic subtext, he simultaneously produced works that feel suffused with autumnal expression; of melancholic thoughts of reminiscence, farewell and death. Consequently, the late piano works – the 7 Fantasien Op. 116, the 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117, the 6 Klavierstücke Op. 118 and the 4 Klavierstücke Op. 119 – always tend to weave an especial spell when grouped together in their own recital. However that feeling does feel especially palpable across these readings from Paul Lewis, recorded in January 2018 and January 2019 at the Teldex Studio Berlin. A lot has to do with the gentle, soft-focus quality to his tone, which reaps especial dividends in pieces such as the first Op. 117 Intermezzo in E-flat with its simple cantabile intimacy, or the dreamy trills of the Op. 118 Romance in F major – and yet equally without negating the impact of high-drama declamations such as the opening of the Op. 118 Ballade in G minor. Lewis’s poetic capabilities, and his range of colour and dynamic, are giving you fresh things to appreciate with every new emotional twist and turn. Take the Op. 118 Intermezzo in E-flat minor, for instance, as he moves from despairing, whispered lines that appear lost and floating in darkness, to his defiant central climax. Or the way in which he harnesses metrical push and pull, and rubato, into helping every piece unfurl as an outpouring of constantly developing rhetoric. Sticking with Op. 118, listen to his heart-breaking hesitation just before exiting the flowing pathos of the Intermezzo in A major’s central F minor section. In short, a spellbinding set of readings. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

Pianist Alexandre Tharaud and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras are long-established as a duo team, but this is the first time that Queyras has joined Tharaud for an Erato recording. They have chosen works that lie at the heart of the Romantic repertoire, all by Brahms: his two cello sonatas and the duo’s own transcriptions of six of the Hungarian Dances.

This digital-only Otto Klemperer collection—taken from a 95-disc box set from Warner Classics—contains his complete EMI repertoire. It presents a rich sampling of the German composer and conductor's interpretations of Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, but also serves to illustrate his only real shortcoming of Klemperer—his limiting his recordings, for the most part, to composers of central Europe.That quibble notwithstanding, this is a must-have set for collectors—not just Klemperer aficionados, but anyone wishing to hear superb renditions of the masterpieces in the set by one of the 20th Century's great conductors. Although Klemperer claimed to dislike recording, you would never guess it listening to these performances; the only explanation for his paradoxical claim being that he held to the same high standards in the studio as he did in the concert hall.Particularly enjoyable in the set is Mendelssohn's incidental music for Midsummer Night's Dream. Klemperer conducts the numbers with the requisite light and graceful touch that the music demands. Somewhat of a rarity in this recording are the vocal portions being sung in Shakespearean English.Also outstanding is a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with Annie Fischer as soloist, though it suffers somewhat from its rather dull recorded sound. All the works in this set, though, are beautifully performed. Adding to the listener's enjoyment are the expert remasterings done by Warner Classics' engineers in 24-bit/192 kHz sound. © Anthony Fountain/Qobuz

Even though Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique is one of the most familiar classical works, performances are often surprising for the variety of sonorities that can still be found in it and for the exciting ways it can be interpreted. Berlioz was the Romantic showman par excellence, and he made this piece a showcase for what the modern orchestra could do, from conventional playing to special innovative effects. These include the famous timpani chords at the end of the "Scène aux champs," the grotesque brass pedal tones in the "Marche au supplice," and the eerie use of col legno battuto in the "Songe d'une nuit de sabbat," among many others. Of course, the novel aspects of Berlioz's orchestration come off best in live performance, but the next best thing is this hybrid super-audio CD from PentaTone that captures Symphonie fantastique in all its hallucinatory strangeness and vividness. Marek Janowski and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra present the symphony and the King Lear Overture with exquisite polish, and the marvelous audio production practically gets inside the ensemble and allows each part to have its distinctive -- and sometimes disturbing -- place in the mix. Beyond the fabulous sound, this is also an incredibly gripping interpretation because Janowski conveys all the passion and impulsiveness of the drug-addled artist in the work's program. Indeed, the music is as hot-headed and deranged as the composer intended, and listeners will feel compelled to listen to the whole SACD in one sitting, so riveting is this live performance for its high energy and seemingly endless array of skillfully crafted sounds. Highly recommended.© TiVo