Jonathan Plowright’s survey of Brahms’s piano music for BIS could hardly have got off to a more auspicious start. The main piece here is the F sharp minor Piano Sonata Op 2, and from the first few bars of its opening movement, it’s clear that Plowright has got a perfect sense of the scale and the range of this tricky early work. As well as its technical brilliance, the sense of the boundless invention of the young Brahms worrying away at the constraints of sonata form is vividly present. But the brief moments of introspection are given full weight, too, while the hugely ambitious finale, which can so easily lose its way, is perfectly controlled. The rather introspective and very beautiful Variations on an Original Theme Op 21 No 1 are unfolded with ease and refinement, every inner voice in Brahms’s piano writing precisely etched, while the three Intermezzi of Op 117 shift the scale and focus once again, on to playing of total intimacy and quiet poetry. This series should turn out to be worth following very closely.
