Natalya Mnatsakanyan Ruben Kosemyan Plays Brahms Complete Sonatas & Scherzo

Johannes Brahms had decided that his composing days were over, but then the retiree met Richard Mühlfeld, the clarinetist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. Mühlfeld's playing so very much charmed the great composer that he once again put pencil to score paper - and did so again and again - and with magnificent results. Here the two Clarinet Sonatas and the equally marvelous Clarinet Trio are heard for the first time in high-resolution 3-D sound on Super Audio CD in performances by Robert Oberaigner and Michael Schöch - joined by Norbert Anger on the cello.

Robust? Vigorous? Muscular? None of those adjectives even come close to describing these performances by the French Trio Wanderer of Brahms' three piano trios and G minor Piano Quartet. The opening theme of the Allegro con brio in the B flat Trio has rarely sounded so lushly sonorous. The passage work of the Scherzo in the C major Trio has not often been so incredibly relentless. The unisons at the start of the C minor Trio have never been so immensely powerful.

Mozart’s piano sonatas exemplify the economy and subtlety of the composer’s genius. Though simple at first glance, they are works in which each note is filled with musical and expressive purpose. Alexei Lubimov, a master of keyboard repertoire from the Baroque to the contemporary, plays the complete sonatas on three instruments modelled on 18th century originals. These interpretations, which explore the particular possibilities of the fortepiano, led Gramophone to praise Lubimov’s “uncommon sensibility” and “refinements of colouring, articulation and nuance” in playing that “is fluent and even, never mechanical in its brilliance.”

It's good to report Naxos again sweeping aside the competition not only in price, but in the quality of both performance and recording as well. Not that Brahms's organ works have received quite as much exposure on CD as one would have expected. The 11 Chorale Preludes, Brahms's swan-song (the cynics would describe it as a deathbed conversion), for all their popularity are elusive works attempting a synthesis between the essentially functional chorale prelude form and the intimate, personal language of an impromptu.

The conclusion and crowning culmination of an epochal project: Vol. 5 rounds off Hardy Rittner’s acclaimed Brahms complete recording on historical pianos. The careful selection of lavishly and lovingly restored concert grand pianos perfectly suited to this task enhances the value of this pioneering edition even more. The present release comes with a double high point: Rittner performs the variation cycles, works of the highest virtuosity producing an extraordinary audience impact, on a Steinway & Sons concert grand piano, serial number 553, manufactured around 1860.

A unique coupling on record of vibrant and impassioned chamber music by the uncleand-nephew Armenian composers.

Playing the 1716 Booth Stradivari, violinist Arabella Steinbacher plays Johannes Brahms’s three Violin Sonatas, as well as the Scherzo he contributed to the FAE Sonata, with a prepossessing tonal command, captured and reproduced by PentaTone’s engineers, who have balanced both performers close up yet communicating a sense of the venue’s spaciousness (the recording took place in September 2000, at the Concertboerderij Valthermond). In the Vivace ma non troppo of Brahms’s First Violin Sonata, Steinbacher mixes strength and tenderness, exhibiting a wide dynamic range that the recorded sound has transmitted to the listeners. Robert Kulek’s introduction and accompanying figures at the second movement’s opening also reverberate warmly in the ambiance underneath Steinbacher’s sound, especially thick and honeyed in these passages (even at times recalling Mischa Elman’s fabled tone).