Johannes Brahms: Klavierstücke Op.76,118,119 – Michele Campanella

Legendary Italian pianist Michele Campanella returns to Odradek following the success of his releases of Mussorgsky & Scriabin and Liszt’s Annees de pelerinage, for which he was praised in Gramophone magazine for “vividly individual” playing that “strikes just the right balance between devotion and poetry”.

In Ruckblick, Campanella turns his exceptional gifts to the music of Brahms, with the Klavierstucke Op. 76, 118 and 119. Playing a Steinway grand piano dating from 1892, Campanella combines brightness of tone with tranquillity of interpretation to create a magical aura of sound; a warm, meditative and intimate approach to these miniature masterpieces.

In these pieces, Campanella finds a perfect balance between Brahms’s poetry and his formal organisation, suggesting in his liner notes that it is in this relationship that we find the key to Brahms’s musical personality. Campanella argues that in the later works especially, Brahms’s avoidance of larger-scale forms such as the piano sonata was a conscious turning inwards, allowing space for “emotional investigations into the subtlest ripples of his shadowy sensitivity”.

An unmissable release of some of Brahms’s finest and most revealing piano music played by a musician whose maturity and insight offer profound new pathways into this repertoire.