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Track Listing:

1
Brahms - Intermezzo in E-Flat Minor
 
2
Brahms - Romanze in F Major
 
3
Brahms - Intermezzo in F Minor
 
4
Brahms - Ballade in G Minor
 
5
Brahms - Intermezzo in A Major
 
6
Brahms - Intermezzo in A Minor
 
7
Brahms - Andante con moto
 
8
Brahms - Andante non troppo e con molto espressione
 
9
Brahms - Andante moderato
 
10
Brahms - Intermezzo in B-Flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4
 
11
Brahms - Intermezzo in A-Flat Major, Op. 76, No. 3
 
12
Brahms - Capriccio in B Minor, Op. 76, No. 2
 
13
Brahms - Capriccio in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 76, No. 1
 

Arcadi Volodos :

Volodos plays Brahms


Four years after his last album, outstanding pianist Arcadi Volodos explores Brahms's late works for the piano. In terms of their personally coloured intimacy and compactness the three collections of piano pieces op. 76, op. 117 and op. 118 are in Volodos's view among the greatest works ever written. His recording of them will be released on the Sony Classical label on 7 April 2017.

An unequivocal conclusion: "These are manifestly masterpieces," finds Arcadi Volodos. For him Brahms's late piano pieces are among the greatest works in the history of music. "By this stage of his career Brahms had already demonstrated his complete mastery of every large-scale form: he had written symphonies, concertos and sonatas. But now he turned to a miniature format and poured all of his experience into it. His style was now uncommonly compact and at the same time supremely personal. I find that very moving."

Brahms had published no piano music for a number of years when he returned to the medium in 1878 and composed a set of miniature character-pieces. For Arcadi Volodos this op. 76 collection represents "an introduction, a foretaste of the late, even more intimate works". By this date Brahms was in his mid-fifties and had spent many years studying the works of a much older generation of composers, his interest motivated by a mixture of veneration and delight in experimentation. It was on this basis that he began to refine his own musical language. The filigree textures of these character-pieces and – to quote Volodos – the "inexpressible depths" that Brahms explored in his final works turn these compositions into arguably the most personal that the composer bequeathed to posterity. As such, they are wholly innocent of any outside influence.

This is especially true of the op. 117 and op. 118 sets. Brahms himself once described the Three Intermezzos op. 117 as "lullabies for my sorrows", without, however, saying anything more specific about what he meant by this. Arcadi Volodos is convinced that this music "opens a new door on a world that we cannot really explain or define, a world that exists not in life but not in death either." Whereas the Three Intermezzos contain subtle harmonic links between the three different works, the op. 118 Piano Pieces, while existing independently of one another, none the less reveal a carefully thought-through dramaturgical design, with dramatic and lyric pieces alternating with one another. It is not just the neutral generic term "piano pieces" that points the way forward to the modern period in music – Schoenberg and Rihm were only two of the later composers to use this title – but their musical language, too, hesitantly opens the door on Impressionism. Above all, however, these works bear witness to a soul often sicklied over by the pale cast of melancholy. And yet Arcadi Volodos warns against equating this melancholy too closely with a particular situation in the composer's life. "No matter whether it's joy, love, passion or, indeed, melancholy – all of this is found in real life, even in the lives of the great composers. But in music these states of mind acquire a higher, more refined and sublimated state." To that extent, Arcadi Volodos's principal concern when recording these late works by Brahms was to reproduce the music's many subtly nuanced colours. "For this intimate music in particular a wide range of colours and nuances is a basic precondition."

The present recording was made in the Teldex Studios in Berlin between June 2015 and January 2017.