COMPOSERS: Brahms & His Friends
LABELS: Carlton
WORKS: Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5
PERFORMER: Dirk Joeres (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 30367 02232
The highlight of this imaginative programme must be Brahms’s epic
F minor Piano Sonata. But some of the character pieces by his contemporaries prove equally enthralling, not least the hypnotic Elegie by Julius Otto Grimm, which provides an intriguing foretaste of Brahms’s late piano style. The German pianist Dirk Joeres performs with great sensitivity and a superb control of inner voicing. Although the piano tone is clangorous in the upper register,
it does not distract from some exceptional
music-making.