Brahms

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

In Samson Tsoy’s artfully designed solo debut recording, ideas reverberate across the centuries as Brahms’s elaborations of works by two past masters are juxtaposed with reworkings of his own music by two later composers.

Brahms showed an early interest in Hungarian gypsy music, to which he had been introduced by his early acquaintance with Remenyi and his continuing friendship with Joseph Joachim, whose background was similar. In the 1850 she played gypsy melodies on the piano, some of which were never written down. The group of ten Hungarian Dances for solo piano was published in 1872, after earlier rejection of a smaller group of dances by a less acute publisher than Simrock, who issued the first set of dances in a piano duet version in 1869.

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.

The London Symphony Orchestra's cycle of Brahms symphonies was Bernard Haitink's first set of recordings on the LSO Live label, originally released individually throughout 2004-05, and then as a boxed set in 2005. This collection of remastered recordings is now available on SACD, and digitally in spatial audio. Bernard Haitink's revelatory Brahms recordings with the LSO have demonstrated why fresh new interpretations of his major works are so important, and why the composer's music is still so relevant today.

For their latest album, recorded live at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Christian Gerhaher and his long-time duo-partner, Gerold Huber, have revisited the songs of the great Romantic composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).

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.

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.

Brahms had long been immersed in the folk traditions and spirit of Hungary’s musical repertoire, not least through the famous violinist Ede Reményi, for whom he played as piano accompanist.

A complete collection of Brahms’s work for trio, illuminating the span of his career in new, Italian-made recordings. Over the course of almost 40 years, the greater span of his career, Brahms composed five trios in different instrumentations.