Search - Brahms, Penneys :: All Brahms: Ballades Op 10: Fantasies Op 116

This selection of Brahms's piano pieces offers an interesting perspective on his early and late styles, and on his way with the Hungarian gypsy music he loved. The Ballades, written when the composer was 21, are poetic, dreamy character pieces whose lyricism can become spooky and dramatic, as in the one inspired by the Scottish ballad "Edward." The Fantasies are the first of four sets of pieces written almost 40 years later; ranging from delicate and wistful to passionate, rhetorical, and turbulent, they are full of Brahms's characteristic syncopations and cross-rhythms. The Dances, originally piano duets and best-known in their later orchestrations, are widely beloved, wonderfully idiomatic arrangements of gypsy music popular at the time. The solo version is heard least often; its dazzlingly virtuosic, imaginative piano writing proves that Brahms was a masterful pianist. Rebecca Penneys, well-known as recitalist, chamber musician, and teacher, is technically brilliant and musically daring. She favors fast tempos and powerful sonorities and treats the music with great romantic freedom, but in the Dances, this often results in rhythmic excess and distortion. --Edith Eisler