INFODAD.COM: Family-Focused Reviews
(++++) BRAHMS AND BEYOND
Brahms’ own later pieces, however, often have a succinctness that in no way reduces their communicative potential. In particular, his final four works for solo piano, Opp. 116-119, are intimate, personal, nostalgic, mostly quiet, and very much unlike his earlier, expansive, virtuosic and large-scale piano music. Pianist Steven Masi uses this fact to excellent effect on a new Navona CD on which he plays Brahms’ Op. 117 and Op. 118 – plus two contemporary pieces that are responses to and commentaries upon Brahms’ music. This could easily degenerate into an exchange of consonance for dissonance, a set of variations unrecognizable in their relationship to Brahms’ original material, or some other form of “tribute” that would be self-aggrandizing and would not elucidate anything. But that is not what happens here, thanks to the Continue reading BRAHMS AND BEYOND