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

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam is forging a reputation as one of the most creative and versatile quartets of its generation. The Guardian commented on their "lithe, lively sound and alert sense of structure and detail". This recording, their first for Rubicon, of the Brahms Quartets and the second of the String Quintets for which they are joined by Finnish violist Lilli Maijala, will be eagerly awaited by their growing band of followers and chamber music fans generally. The quartet play with unwound gut strings and a set of bespoke classical bows. © Rubicon

Reissued in 2008 as volume four of Deutsche Grammophon's Karajan Master Recordings series, this pairing of Brahms' Second and Third symphonies from the Austrian conductor's early-'60s cycle of the four symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker is as beautiful a pair of performances of these often recorded works as has ever been released. The singing tone of the themes, the tensile strength of the lines, the brilliant sheen of the colors, the lush lucidity of the textures, the sculpted warmth of the sonorities, the subtle power of the rhythms, and the elegant inevitability of the structures: these qualities have never before or since been equaled, much less surpassed, in any other recorded performance. Even later Karajan accounts with either the Berliner or the Wiener Philharmonikers didn't surpass them for sheer beauty. Inevitably, the textures grew more lush than lucid, the sonorities turned from sculpted to smooth, and the structures seemed less aesthetically inevitable than egotistically unstoppable. But in these recordings from 1963 and 1964, Karajan and the Berlin musicians assuredly created performances that stand as among the finest of their kind. Digitally remastered, Deutsche Grammophon's stereo sound is still a model of translucence.© TiVo

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Johannes Brahms may have had no greater admirer in fin de siècle Vienna, than Alexander von Zemlinsky, who as a young composer studied his scores voraciously, and in many cases, adopted Brahms' style, particularly in his early works. Yet the String Quartet No. 3, Op. 19, composed in 1924, is a far cry from the passionate late Romanticism that was characteristic of Brahms and his immediate followers and is much closer to the free atonality and angular expressionism of Arnold Schoenberg, Zemlinsky's one-time student, and son-in-law, as well as a fellow Brahms enthusiast. Curiously, the String Quartet No. 3 is a strong reaction against Schoenberg's recently discovered 12-tone method and a demonstration of how to use modified tonality to achieve many of the same effects of atonal expressionism without abandoning pitch centers. Even so, there seems to be a rather large gulf between Brahms' autumnal Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115 and the Zemlinsky work, so the connections between the pieces may seem tenuous, except for Zemlinsky's grounding as a committed Brahmsian. The Quartetto Adorno plays both works with admirable control, and the Brahms performance features clarinetist Alessandro Carbonare, whose warm timbres and smooth phrasing are at the service of the work's nostalgic and poignant moods. The pairing of these works isn't a common thing, so the group deserves credit for drawing comparisons between Brahms and Zemlinsky and making listeners think of the influences at work in Viennese music at the transition between late Romanticism and early modernism.© TiVo

Studio recordings are rare things today. Orchestras are of such great quality that publishers prefer live recordings, which are much cheaper than long studio sessions, with their complex production workloads. And so this is a rather "old-fashioned" (it's fashionable) publication here from Decca, directed by Smyon Bychkov, a conductor who has rarely appeared on records for some years. Born in the Soviet Union in 1952, Semyon Bychkov was destined for a fine career in his country when, at the age of 21, he was offered the opportunity to replace the titan Mravinski at the head of the Leningrad (today St Petersburg) Philharmonic Orchestra. But his contract was cancelled because of his political opinions: a move that obliged him to seek refuge in the USA, where his career truly began in earnest. Obtaining US nationality, he became the director of the Paris Orchestra for ten years, before accepting a similar post at the head of the WDR Cologne Radio Orchestra. Named the resident at the prestigious Czech Philharmonia following the premature death of its leader Jiří Bělohlávek, Semyon Bychkov started work on this anthology of Tchaikovsky's symphonic works, including the six symphonies, the rare and little-loved "Manfred" Symphony (in its original, uncut version, including the harmonium stipulated by the conductor), the piano concertos and the Serenade for strings. This was marathon job taken at a record-breaking sprint between 2015 and 2019. In the course of this project, the Russian conductor undertook minute work on the scores and studying the personal history of the composer, in particular around the Pathétique Symphony. For him, it wasn't a requiem to Tchaikovsky, but rather a "revolt against death and not the idea of death itself". As for the famous First Concerto, played here by Kirill Gerstein, he presents the more intimate original version, which is less emphatic than the one we are used to hearing. A fine piece of work with what Bychkov has described as an ideal orchestra, which mixes the highest expression of the Slavic spirit with a Western spirit: a synthesis which sums up Tchaikovsky's music itself. © François Hudry/Qobuz

After recording J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to near perfection with the English Concert in 1982, it might seem redundant for Trevor Pinnock to try his hand at them again in this 2007 set with the European Brandenburg Ensemble. Allowing for certain variables of interpretation and execution between the two versions, which should be expected at a remove of 25 years, one can still expect Pinnock to turn in elegant period readings that don't diverge too dramatically from his earlier recordings on Archiv. On this exquisite set, released by Avie -- a label that lets its artists take creative risks that many major labels won't -- Pinnock explores the Brandenburgs with considerable freedom and inventiveness, particularly in adjusting the size of his ensemble according to acoustical needs, and in his employment of musicians from several different countries and performing backgrounds. To the trained ear, these concertos have a slightly darker coloration, due to the tuning at A415, and some experts may detect where the high- or low-tone violones are used in substitution for the standard cello or double bass. Yet to most listeners, these performances won't sound experimental or daring, since the changes are wholly appropriate to the Baroque era, when instrumentation and other practices varied in almost every performance. Yet in terms of expression, this set may seem a little richer, warmer, and a bit more relaxed than its predecessor, and the ensemble's presence is almost palpable in the close-up, highly detailed reproduction. Anyone who already owns the earlier recordings may feel this attempt is "gilding the lily," but Pinnock's second traversal of the Brandenburgs is definitely worth hearing, and is highly recommended to others who need a terrific version, by any standard.© TiVo

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

And why not pair the Brahms Violin Concerto with Bartók? While the assembly is probably a first in the history of discography, it is true that Brahms and Bartók are of Hungarian descent - well, Brahms comes from Gypsy-Viennese origins rather than purely Hungarian traditions, but the heart is most certainly there - so too is that ever-present tendancy for ample melodic phrasing, so aptly captured by the violin where a piano simply falls short. Moreover, only thirty short years separate the two works: one for 1878, another in 1908... The Bartók Concerto comes with a story: the composer had offered it up as gift of a somewhat unrequited love to a young Stefi Geyer, who kept the score to her death, without ever playing it. Meanwhile, Bartók wrote another concerto thirty years later, at one time thought to be the one and only of its kind and genre. The "first" concerto was created in 1958 under the leadership of Paul Sacher. For this recording with Antonio Pappano, Dutch violinist Janine Jansen is completely at ease in the great concerto repertoire. Jansen plays a 1727 Stradivarius and brings great passion, emotion and skill to the world chamber music. The Brahms Concerto was recorded live in Rome in February 2015, the Bartók in London in August 2014. © SM / Qobuz