It seems that the Hamburg born Brahms with his consistently highly romantic compositions is indeed made for the German soul and thus a chip pass for interpreters from the German-speaking countries. That this is a pure prejudice, there is proof by convincingly merging southern sun as well as temperament and seriousness on recordings from the forties and fifties of the Italian maestros Victor de Sabata (4th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic) and of Arturo Toscanini, who gave us marveling future generations recordings of all Brahms symphonies with his NBC-Orchestra and in a famous late live recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was a no less convincing Brahms interpreter on the piano. Why, then, should not Spaniards be equally congenial interpreters of Brahm's chamber music?

In the case of the brand-new album "The Brahms Project", four young Spaniards who have joined together for this purpose as an ensemble want to provide proof of the fact that Brahm's chamber music is flourishing and competitive under the southern sun based on all the piano quartets of the Hamburg born composer. If they do not make music together, the four Spaniards, the pianist Enrique Bagaría, the violinist Josep Colomém, the violist Joaquín Riquelme and the cellist David Apellániz follow their own musical ways as soloists and as members of symphony orchestras and other chamber music associations as the quartet they got together for on this album.

"The Complete Piano Quartets" comprise all three piano quartets, composed in three different sections of the composer's life. The first quartet Op. 25 of the thirty-one-year-old Brahms experienced his first performance in Hamburg in 1861 with no less a pianist than Clara Schumann herself and with Joseph Joachim on the violin. The last movement of the first piano quartet, the Rondo alla Zingarese, to which the four Spaniards not only give the appropriate impetus, but also a fine delicacy - ennobling the Rondo beyond its musical easiness - nearly is something like a hit, but at least one of the most unusual and successful chamber music pieces, not only of the Romantic period, the Rondo beyond the musical vivacity.

Although the second piano quartet Op. 22 was written just one year after the first quartet, it nevertheless falls into a completely different section of the composer's life, who had now moved to Vienna, where he met Josef Hellmesberger, who had been presiding the local Philharmonic, and who also had been active as a violinist in his own quartet. Members of the Hellmesberger Quartet took over the strings at the very successful premiere of the second piano quartet, in which Johannes Brahms himself performed as a pianist. This quartet, influenced by Schumann and Schubert, has an unusually long duration of 50 minutes in the sometimes already symphonic, but always transparent presentation of the Spanish quartet, conferring this Brahms piano the quartet the due importance.

The third piano quartet Op. 60 had been finished in 1875. However, his first two movements remained in the drawer for 20 years, until Brahms found the courage to complete the work in 1875. The reason for this was psychological confusion by the relationship to Clara Schumann, to whom Brahms had been in unhappy love, and with the husband of whom he was a friend. The first two movements of Op. 60 convey the confused feeling of Brahms, caught in a triad, while the later composed movements reprocess the dilemma, among other things, with reference to Beethoven's destiny symphony. Without falling into sentimentalism, the four Spaniards express impressively the soul-torments composed in the third Brahms piano quartet, and show in the two later composed movements, no less impressively, the super elevation of the earlier suffering to a victory over the suffering.

The album "The Brahms Project" was produced in the format of DSD256 (11,289MHz). It is available as a download in addition to DSD in the formats of MQA, FLAC 96 and FLAC 192. Based on Neumann U89i and Schoeps microphones, the recording engineer succeeded in providing a transparent, finely structured recording convincingly mirroring the very dynamic performance of the musicians and integrating the three strings and the Piano (Steinway & Sons) into a sound space with almost ideal acoustics.

Josep Colomé, violin
Joaquín Riquelme, viola
David Apellániz, cello
Enrique Bagaría, piano