Brahms hi Ress

In these love songs in waltz style for chorus or solo voices accompanied by piano four hands, Brahms freely indulged his taste for Viennese folk music. The RIAS Kammerchor Berlin instils a wonderful inner life in these musical landscapes, sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy, punctuated here by a selection from the Hungarian Dances – also eminently popular in their inspiration.

Instrumental arrangements of Brahms at his most unbuttoned and relaxed, including a world premiere recording for this version of the Zigeunerlieder.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents an imaginative album of three compositions by Johannes Brahms, in an outstanding interpretation from Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony. It features the first recording of American composer and Kansas City native Virgil Thomson’s 1957/8 orchestration of Brahms: Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, op 122.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents an imaginative album of three compositions by Johannes Brahms, in an outstanding interpretation from Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony. It features the first recording of American composer and Kansas City native Virgil Thomson’s 1957/8 orchestration of Brahms: Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, op 122.

Pianist Malcolm Martineau is the brilliant initiator of this new one-of-a-kind series on Linn. The Brahms Songbook has set the unprecedented goal to record Brahms’s lieder by complete opus number. In this second instalment, Malcolm is joined by star mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann in five sets that were composed and published over a period of thirty years: Op. 72, Op. 105, Op. 43, Op. 48 and Op. 57. In a time when the middle-class was growing, song-writing was both lucrative and pleasurable, offering a myriad of ways to explore perennially popular topics like unrequited love. Yet, in the lieder recorded here Brahms immerses us in a heightened emotional world, distant from the drawing rooms and concert halls of the bourgeoisie.

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Mari Kodama presents New Paths, exploring the young Johannes Brahms and his fascinating friendship with Clara and Robert Schumann. The album derives its title from Robert Schumann’s famous essay “Neue Bahnen”, in which he heralded the young Brahms as the most eminent musical voice of the future.

A collection of exquisite Brahmsian miniatures: brief meditations on last things before—in Stephen Hough’s own words—‘the light fades and the final cigar is extinguished’.

The pianist Jonathan Fournel, recent prizewinner of the prestigious 2021 Queen Elisabeth Competition (where he won not only the Queen Elisabeth Grand Prix, but also the Queen Mathilde Prize, the Musiq3 Audience Prize and the Canvas-Klara Award) has joined the Alpha label for several recordings, starting with a Brahms programme recorded in the superb acoustic of the music room at La Chaux-de-Fonds just before the Competition: ‘Over the years, for me Brahms has become a figure I admire so tremendously, a composer I can never tire of.

Born in 1982, Lorenzo Cossi graduated in Trieste Conservatory “G. Tartini” with Giuliana Gulli, sister of the great violinist Franco Gulli. He continued studying with Giuliana Gulli and with Nino Gardi, following also masterclasses by great musicians, such as Joachim Achùcarro in Siena, Elisso Virsaladze (Sermoneta, Italy), William Grant Naborè (Lake Como International Piano Academy) and Jerome Lowenthal (Music Academy of the West, California).