This is an intimate and revealing recording that captures the long-standing spark between the Italian pianists Federica Righini and Riccardo Zadra while bringing us unusually close to the feel of Brahms’s own hand in the writing. Performed on a single 1860 Streicher piano, their four-hand reading of the String Quintets Opp. 88 (F major, 1882) and 111 (G major, 1890) restores the music to the instrument on which Brahms conceived and tested it.
Op. 88 follows the Second Symphony and Second Piano Concerto and still carries something of that expansive, sunlit energy. Op. 111, written later and initially intended as a farewell to composition, is more compressed yet emotionally wider-ranging. The two quintets therefore mark different stages of Brahms’s late chamber style.
Righini and Zadra play on one instrument, one taking the primo (upper) part and the other the secondo (lower) part, seated side by side at the same keyboard. In the nineteenth century, before recordings, piano four-hands was the standard way for chamber, orchestral and other multi-instrument works to circulate in the home and among musicians. The two artists are unusually well attuned. They have worked together as a piano duo for more than thirty-five years, having first met as young pianists at the École Internationale de Piano in Lausanne. Their partnership is both professional and personal and they are long-term life partners as well as musical collaborators.
Hearing the works in the four-hand versions strips away orchestral or string colour and makes the counterpoint easier to follow, keeping the higher and lower voices clearly readable. The 1860 Streicher further shapes the experience: bass, middle and treble have more distinct timbres than on a modern piano.
Throughout the performance there is a vital dynamic between Righini and Zadra as they negotiate the same material with two conscious interpretations running in parallel. The Japanese aesthetic concept of ma (間)—the meaningful interval, pause or space between things—helps describe the subtle moments of tension and release that occur where the two players are not perfectly fused. Brahms’s intention is to tightly control the composition, yet in this performance one feels the presence of the performers in the slight differences of attack, or in the moments when one line yields while the other presses.
Brahms almost always worked out ideas at the piano, and these arrangements make that process audible. One hears the complex synthesis that characterises his mature style: the songful warmth associated with his intensive study of Schubert, the contrapuntal discipline drawn from Bach and earlier music, and the procedures of developing variation he absorbed from Beethoven.
Op. 88 feels spring-like and affectionate in the manner of Schubert while remaining tightly constructed. The opening movement has a pastoral, folksy lyricism; the second theme in A major is lilting and graceful. Instead of the usual move to the key a fifth higher, Brahms often shifts the music into keys a third away. The central movement moves between a deeply felt Grave and a lighter Allegretto, giving a range of emotional colour without abandoning the structural economy. The result is a work that retains its affectionate feeling while remaining tightly organised.
Op. 111 is grander in scale and density and bears the imprint of classical and Romantic models. The first movement opens with one of Brahms’s longest and most athletic themes in a sonata-form context; the melody is expansive yet still subjected to continuous reshaping and dense scoring. The Adagio is a free set of variations on an elegiac theme, with a stormy middle section that recalls the turbulent later Schubert. In the finale, the cadential scaffolding functions as a flexible formal device rather than simple closure: phrase lengths are stretched and cadences are delayed or re-voiced. Beethoven’s influence is absorbed into Brahms’s own late style rather than appearing as direct quotation.
The recording appears on Da Vinci Classics, the classical arm of Da Vinci Publishing, an independent Japanese label and music publisher based in Osaka. It was founded and is run by Edmondo Filippini, an Italian musicologist who has long lived in Japan (he previously worked with the Italian Cultural Institute in Osaka and teaches at a Japanese university). For an independent label the scale and ambition are impressive: a large annual output of recordings and scores, including major complete editions. Japan has a particularly rich independent classical sector that has long supported Japanese performers and specialised repertoire. Da Vinci Classics sits within this space yet is strongly oriented toward European (especially Italian) repertoire, performers and scholarly projects and I look forward to future releases.
