Brahms: Piano Quartets Nos 2 and 3 album review – high-class chamber music with a star team player

‘Every great composer wrote some kind of quartet with piano”, says Krystian Zimerman. “It’s a fantastic richness of music history that is often underestimated.” That’s even true of the three examples by Brahms, which are certainly less often heard than many of his other chamber works, such as the piano quintet and piano trios. In fact, the best known of his three piano quartets is the first in G minor, largely because it is often heard in the masterly orchestral version of it that Schoenberg made in the 1930s.

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Zimerman and his colleagues, violinist Maria Nowak, viola player Katarzyna Budnik and cellist Yuya Okamoto, focus on the other two quartets, with playing of unforced democratic refinement. There’s never any sense of these pieces being turned into vehicles for a star pianist, even one of Zimerman’s stellar reputation; whether leading off the furious scherzo of the C minor quartet Op 60 or providing the running backdrop as the violinist presents the lyrical main theme in the finale of the same work, Zimerman is very much a team player in every sense. This is high-class chamber music in every respect.

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