Johannes Brahms appears here as a hopeless romantic, a genius troubled by lovesickness and performance nerves. The series suggests these feelings fed his composing rather than hindered it. Nobody before him, it argues, had fitted such quantities of raw emotion into such restrained musical language, which secured his lasting place in history.
Brahms’s release was the eighth of twelve, arriving on 1 March 2011 after the Debussy album and before the Schumann album. The twelve albums came out between 2 November 2010 and 19 April 2011, typically about two weeks apart.
“Hungarian Dance No. 5” is on the 100-track compilation. Each album in the run focuses on a single composer. See all releases on the albums page or return to the home page.