This is Volume 2 in our series devoted to the works for solo piano by Johannes Brahms with the acclaimed pianist Barry Douglas. Since winning the Gold Medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, Douglas has established a major international career, and his reputation as a pianist and conductor continues to grow.

Brahms wrote his set of four Ballades, Op.10 (of which Nos 2 and 3 are included on this disc) at the age of twenty-one, and at a time of much personal upheaval. His friend and patron Schumann had attempted suicide and been confined to a sanatorium near Bonn, and Brahms had been thrust into the role of protector and comforter of Schumann’s wife, Clara, while coming to terms with his own strong feelings for her. Reflective of the difficult situation, these Ballades display a deep-felt blend of the dramatic and the lyrical.

A few months before he composed the Ballades, during his stay with the Schumanns in October 1853, Brahms completed a new piano sonata with which he had been struggling throughout the spring and summer of that year. Published as his Sonata No.3, it would remain his single largest keyboard composition. It unites aspects of his two previous sonatas – the classical features of No.1 with the romantic, fantasia-like character of No.2 – and surpasses both of them in virtuosity and structural command.

Brahms’s collections of short piano pieces, issued as Op.116–19, were among his final compositions for piano, and although a few of them provide brief glimpses of the old energy and fire, most are reflective, and deeply introspective in character. This was music that Brahms wrote to play for himself, or at the most to a few close friends. In fact, Clara Schumann was the first to see these in their manuscript form.

Sound/Video

Paused

1

Ballade op.10 no.2
2

Ballade, op.118 no.3
3

Intermezzo, op.117 no.2
4

Rhapsody, op.119 no.4
5

Intermezzo, op.116 no.2
6

Intermezzo, op.116 no.6
7

Ballade, op.10 no.3
8

Piano Sonata no.3, op.5 - I.Allegro Maestoso
9

Piano Sonata no.3, op.5 - II.Andante
10

Piano Sonata no.3, op.5 - III.Scherzo
11

Piano Sonata no.3, op.5 - IV.Intermezzo
12

Piano Sonata no.3, op.5 - V.Finale

Europadisc Review

The solo music of Johannes Brahms stands at the peak of the Romantic piano repertoire. Ranging from the full-blooded early piano sonatas and towering variation sets, via the middle-period rhapsodies to the exquisitely poised late piano pieces, this is a body of work that presents pianists with one of the supreme musical challenges.

The first instalment of Barry Douglas’s ambitious complete survey appeared in 2012. Imaginatively programmed as a recital disc (rather than an opus-by-opus traversal), with one large-scale work complemented by a selection of shorter pieces, it was enthusiastically received, and promised great things for the rest of the cycle. This second release fully lives up to that promise.

In place of volume one’s Handel Variations, here the main work is the epically heroic five-movement Third Sonata (1853), at well over half an hour Brahms’s longest single work for solo piano. In Douglas’s supremely skilful hands, it receives a marvellously noble performance, full of warmth and depth of tone, and equal to all the technical and musical challenges of the monumental outer movements and the thrillingly demonic central Scherzo. At the same time, Douglas deploys the greatest delicacy and poise in the lyrical passages, and in the thematically linked slow movements. This is playing of immense maturity and cogency, vibrantly passionate, yet alive to the music’s every detail.

That same suppleness and pliancy is evident in the shorter works. There is an enthrallingly vocal quality to Douglas’s playing, particularly appropriate to the two Opus 10 ballades included here, but also an almost orchestral range of colours — a reminder of Barry Douglas’s parallel career as a conductor.

The selection of late piano works includes two of the Intermezzos from Op.116, completing the cycle from disc 1. In the more forthright pieces, such as the Ballade Op.118/3 and the Rhapsody Op.119/4, Douglas combines strength and passion with a sustained, singing line. In the more delicate works, he captures perfectly the music’s fragile beauties, and its intensely personal qualities.

Above all, there is to Douglas’s playing, as there is in Brahms’s music itself, an ability to go straight to the emotional heart of the matter in an utterly direct and sincere manner. Composer and performer together seem to have distilled this music to the absolute essentials. With Brahms playing of the highest order, excellent recorded sound and generous notes, you need not hesitate. Anyone who already has volume one of this exciting cycle will certainly want volume one; those who as yet have neither will surely want both!