We travel back to nineteenth-century Germany with conductor Martyn Brabbins this afternoon for two of Brahms’s works.
Filled with an irrepressible sense of fun, Academic Festival Overture was described by the composer himself as ‘a very boisterous potpourri of student songs’ and, despite its title, is deliciously and defiantly ‘un-academic’.
For our second visit, we observe Brahms through the prism of his admirer, Schoenberg, for the Piano Quartet. Schoenberg penned his colourful, orchestral arrangement having noted that the piece was “always very badly played”. “The better the pianist” Schoenberg reasoned, “the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted for once to hear everything, and this I have achieved.”
Also this afternoon we hear Schoenberg’s rarely performed set of six songs, an intense and powerful cycle of miniatures with a hint of Wagner’s influence.
This concert is a live broadcast for BBC Radio 3.
