Adagio
Andantino un poco agitato
Grazioso e giocoso
Allegro risoluto

In May 1893, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann about the first of his latest set of piano pieces: ‘It is teeming with dissonances! These are correct and can be explained – but perhaps they won’t be to your taste. This little piece is exceptionally melancholic and … every bar and every note must sound like a ritardando, as if one wanted to suck melancholy out of each one, taking pleasure in all those dissonances! Good Lord, surely this description will arouse your interest!’

The Intermezzo in B minor (marked Adagio) is based on a falling idea of infinite sadness, and it reveals the extent to which Brahms was continuing to experiment as he turned 60: this is music of haunting strangeness, making imaginative use of the sustaining power of the piano to create overlapping dissonances. The E minor Intermezzo that follows is demonstration of Brahms’s distilled, economical late style, dominated by a persistent motif from which all the material is derived (including its own accompaniment). The C major Intermezzo is a gentle scherzo, full of rhythmic inventiveness, and the set ends with a flamboyant Rhapsody in E flat major which has surprises too: using five-bar phrases, and ending in E flat minor.

© Nigel Simeone 2015