FREE@3 Concert Series Presents: BrahmsFest

Come and enjoy with us a selection of chamber music works by Johannes Brahms! Our program features the Piano Quintet in F minor and the Piano Quartet in G minor. 
Piano Quintet in F minor (op.34): The combination of string quartet and piano makes the piano quintet a singularly powerful ensemble as it joins two self-sufficient forces in a grand partnership. Occurring far less frequently in the repertoire than string or piano quartets, the great works for this medium are equally singular and powerful coming from the likes of Schumann, Franck, Brahms, Dvorak, Faure and Shostakovich as the most noteworthy examples. While Brahms's lone Piano Quintet in f minor, Op. 34 is on the short list of masterworks, it assumed its final form only after a great deal of tinkering. It began life in 1861 as a string quintet with two cellos. Brahms eventually destroyed this version and rescored it as a sonata for two pianos. With the feedback from several performances and the advice of his friends Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Brahms finally settled on the present version for piano quintet that he published in 1865. Joachim would declare that it was the finest new chamber music work published since Schubert. A dark, mighty work of tremendous scope, it is generally considered to be Brahms's great chamber music epic completed when he was only thirty-one.
Piano Quartet in G minor (op.25): A twenty-eight-year-old Brahms wrote his ambitious Piano Quartet No. 1 in g minor in 1861. The third composition in what would become an oeuvre of some twenty-six chamber music masterworks, the quartet enjoys a fine reputation in no small part because of the vigorously effective Gypsy Rondo itself. No less than Arnold Schoenberg found the quartet worthy of his own orchestral transcription. The finale is indeed a tour-de-force of rhythmic and melodic bravado where the sectional form of the rondo serves as a brilliant vehicle for dynamic contrast of the very sort found in traditional Hungarian dances and Bartok's rhapsodies. In the main refrain, Brahms employs a characteristic 2/4 meter, swift with a stomping dactyl accent on the first beat, a mirror of the Hungarian language that tends to accent the first syllable of each word (as in the words "Kodaly" and "Bartok"). In subsequent episodes, Brahms creates fleet and ringing piano textures as if to intentionally evoke the sound of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer commonly found in Hungary and Romania, particularly among the Gypsies. Brahms leverages a rather subtle and intricate rondo structure for a calculated drama delivering the wild escalation and unbridled release of our most thrilling conception of the "Gypsy Style." This work is eloquent and delightful and its beauty speaks for itself.
(excerpts by Kai Christensen)
We hope to have you join us, the concert is free and open to the public. Masks optional but recommended.