Concert - Aimez-vous Brahms ?

Far removed from the epic tone of Chopin’s Ballades, Brahms’s Fourth Ballade seems like a gentle reverie. Don’t be fooled by appearances: it is a dialogue between a mother and her son, a parricide, inspired by an old Scottish ballad, “Edward.” This piece for solo piano serves as an interlude between two powerful quintets: Granados’s, with its dreamlike slow movement (a slightly Moorish melody and muted strings) and its finale with its breathless Gypsy rhythms; and Brahms’s, a pinnacle of the genre, a grand epic brimming with melodic ideas and contrasts. With its highly elaborate composition, in which the instruments interweave in dense counterpoint, it remains deeply captivating, carried by its poetry and energy.