Concert - Aimez-vous Brahms ? — Matoo

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 gen...