Through Brahms Archive

"Through Brahms" Music by Brahms, Schumann and many other composers (TrackList follows) – Music@Menlo Live (7 CDs)

by John Sunier | Apr 19, 2012 | Classical CD Reviews

“Through Brahms” Music by Brahms, Schumann and many other composers (TrackList follows) – Music@Menlo Live, 7 CDs, available singly or boxed in paper wrappers, TT:7:57:00 ****: Music@Menlo chose Brahms as the inspiration for its 2011 chamber music festival and so out comes yet another seven-disc set, available singly or in a convenient slipcase, of programs that highlighted some of the composer’s most beloved chamber works, complemented by music by his most important influences, contemporaries, and artistic heirs. As with past sets, the performances, featuring stars and newcomers, vary unpredictably. Each disc seems to have its own personality, and it is worth noting that there are nuggets of Brahms and Schumann Lieder (with neither texts or adequate synopses) as well as of instrumental gold strewn about.  Disc one, for example, begins with Arnaud Sussmann sublime in Mozart, Eric Kim showing what a cello can do for a unassuming Vivaldi continuo, three dreary Schumann songs, and then a miraculous Brahms Op. 18 Sextet in which Kim gives perhaps the most lyrically beautiful and inventive reading of the first movement’s opening in memory—and that’s just for starters! On disc seven, Paul Neubauer plays Brahms’s Second Viola Sonata with incomparable supernal beauty, as if […]