Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, ‘For the Love of Brahms’. The album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls ‘music about love and friendship’. Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B major, op.8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for violin and cello) in A minor, op.102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

‘For the Love of Brahms’ continues Joshua Bell’s long and acclaimed partnership with the London-based Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Since 2011, Bell has been the orchestra’s principal conductor, succeeding its founder Sir Neville Marriner and the only other person to hold that title. Bell’s most recent Sony Classical recordings with the orchestra include Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a Bach concerto collection, and Bell’s first recording solely as a conductor, of Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies.