Brahms: Rhapsody in E flat major, Op. 119 No. 4

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 albeit 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.

Arthur Rubinstein, Dame Myra Hess and Vladimir de Pachmann are among the great pianists featured on these piano roll recordings. Made between 1905 and 1925 these are truly historical documents, captured in the extraordinary sound of the piano roll to give us fresh and modern sounding performances.