Righini, Federica / Zadra, Riccardo
Brahms: String Quintets - In The Composes Four-hand Pin
This album approaches Brahms from a rare and revealing angle, gathering the authorial transcriptions for piano four hands of the String Quinte in F major op. 88 and String Quintet in G major op. 111. Far from constituting a merely domestic reduction, the pianistic medium appears here as a second site of composition, capable of bringing into sharper relief the inner web, the logic of progressions, and the architectural continuity of Brahmsian thought. The project illuminates at once the Viennese practice of private reading, the function of transcription as an instrument of testing and dissemination, and the passage from the fully mature Brahms to late style. The choice of a Streicher piano lends to this perspective an added historical and timbral resonance.