Johannes Brahms 24 Bit

The Kuss Quartet’s fourth ONYX album is a programme of Brahms and Schoenberg, and they are joined by the German soprano Mojca Erdmann in three Brahms Lieder, and the 2nd of Schoenberg’s four string quartets.

Written twenty years apart, these gems of chamber music by Johannes Brahms present two captivating faces of a complicated romantic composer. Mezzo-soprano Andrea Hill sings the intimate and poignantly nostalgic Zwei Gesänge for mezzo, viola and piano and the Modigliani Quartet is joined by pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger in the crowd-pleasing Piano Quintet, a work of almost symphonic texture and intensity.

Brahms is one of François-Frederic Guy’s favourite composer, he has accompanied him all his life, the first work that he performed in public was his First Concerto. The Brahms Project is, above all, conceived as an amorous dictionary of the composer and not an exhaustive complete recording. It is organised around the piano, the veritable common denominator of an original itinerary combining chamber music, the Lied, the concertos and solo piano works.

"The two cello sonatas by Johannes Brahms are in very stark contrast to each other. This is not solely due to the more than twenty years separating the works.

More than 120 years after the death of Johannes Brahms, the answer to this question would seem to be a foregone conclusion. Not even Arnold Schoenberg’s essay “Brahms the Progressive”, famed at least for its title, has done anything substantial to change it. Schoenberg pointed to the asymmetry and irregularity of Brahms’s phrase structure, his stern adherence to and sharpening of Beethoven’s technique of dislodging the “strong” beats until the rhythm as we previously knew it fully dissolves. What we hear as downbeats are more likely to be upbeats, and vice versa.

For the first time since their recording of Saint-Saëns La Muse et le Poète in 2013, the French brothers reunite for a recording of two of the great pillars of Romantic chamber music – Brahms’ string sextets.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language!” As an American living in London when these recordings were made, I can attest to that sentiment! Perhaps my own grappling with the ever witty Bernard Shaw is found on this set of recordings, with pieces from the UK and the USA that span nearly 122 years of musical history. While many of the musical materials used by these 5 composers are similar, with an emphasis on folk music, classical idioms, and a generally warm and Romantic sensibility, they could not be more different from each other.

„Though recorded periodically and treated as a cultural touchstone in German-speaking countries, Brahms’s Die schöne Magelone still leaves seasoned English-speaking audiences asking, ‘What, exactly, is it?’

Most of us, when contemplating medieval representations of danse macabre, in which Death leads people of all walks of life, do not pay attention to the sound aspect of the allegory. Yet it is very important – where there is dancing, there must also be music. In the oldest depictions, dating back to the end of the Middle Ages, it is Death that plays an instrument. Interestingly, it is a wind instrument, such as a flute or bagpipes, or a percussion instrument.