★★★★★
The soaring, optimistic opening of Brahms's String Quintet No 2 in G major, Op 111 is one of the great moments in chamber music: upper strings, enriched with the addition of a second viola, shimmer and quiver, while the cello utters a plunging, jumping melody in G major. This mood of excitement continues, with a magnificent, lyrical violin tune, almost without let-up - a wistful, minor key second subject notwithstanding - to the end of this long, burgeoning first movement...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-04-27
★★★★★
Except perhaps for the stately way in which the Clarinet Quintet begins, there are no surprises in these performances. Michael Collins plays with his usual suave assurance, the Brodsky Quartet manage the Quintet and the A minor String Quartet immaculately. What is lacking, though, is any sense of necessity, anything that shows that these interpretations demanded to be on disc: there is nothing to set them apart from the myriad recordings of both works that are already available...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-03-07
★★★★★
Every conductor wants to make their mark on the four symphonies of Brahms - recently Riccardo Chailly at the Barbican, currently Andris Nelsons at the Southbank - and then, if they have the chance, commit them to disc. None will be definitive: when it comes to Brahms interpretations, so much comes down to taste. Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO conclude their cycle of live recordings with Symphonies 3 and 4, made in 2010 and 2011...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-01-26
★★★★★
In releasing the two Brahms concertos together, Stephen Hough immediately invites comparisons with the finest recordings of the last half century. There is Emil Gilels's unsurpassed pair of performances from the 1970s with Eugen Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic, and the leading recent version, from Nelson Freire with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly, which came out seven years ago. It's a measure of Hough's achievement that his accounts belong in such company...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-12-05
★★★★★
Leonidas Kavakos appeared in both the Double Concerto and the Violin Concerto during Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus's Brahms residency at the Barbican in London in October. Their superb recording of the Violin Concerto was made in the Gewandhaus in May, and it demonstrates not only the wonderful poise and instinctive elegance of Kavakos's playing - there's not a note out of place, while his pianissimo sound, in the closing moments of the first movement especially, is a marvel - but...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-11-01
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDBrahmsBrahms: Violin Sonatas 1-3.Naive2013 Over gentle, hypnotic piano chords, the violin breathes a singing line of dreamlike beauty: the opening of Brahms's first violin sonata is one of the great moments in music, masterfully recreated here by a brother-and-sister team...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-06-30
★★★★★
Much of Brahms's piano music, with its galloping rhythms and urgent melodic figures, can be called "demonic", the word his friend Schumann used to describe the younger composer's Ballade in B minor Op 10 No 3. It starts in satanic vein but opens into tender lyricism, another Brahms trait. In Volume 2 of the piano music, Barry Douglas is particularly successful with this B minor Ballade, and in the Sonata No 3 Op 5 written around the same time...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-04-01
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDSchubert, Franck, BrahmsSonatas for Viola & Piano Vol.2 - Tabea Zimmermann and Kirill Gerstein.Myrios Classics2013 These revered chamber musicians, the German viola player Tabea Zimmermann and the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein, have chosen these three sonatas with immense care: each was written late in the composer's life, each originally composed for an instrument other than the viola...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-02-16
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDJohannes BrahmsBrahms: Symphonies (CPO: 777720-2)Andrew Manzecpo2012 Andrew Manze, well known as a baroque violinist, broadcaster and former director of the English Concert, has been branching out into the symphonic repertory with his orchestra in Helsingborg, and on this evidence the results are really remarkable...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-05-07
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