New Recording: Brahms Piano Concertos with Sir András Schiff 3 June 2021

Following the success of our collaboration with Sir András Schiff in a series of Brahms concerts at Southbank Centre in 2019, we are delighted to announce the release of our CD recording of Brahms’ Piano Concertos No. 1 and No. 2.
According to the record label ECM records, it has been decades since the two concertos were recorded together.

Of this new recording Schiff says, Brahms’s music is ‘transparent, sensitive, differentiated and nuanced in its dynamics’. Using the principles of Brahms’ favourite orchestra of his time, The Meiningen Court Orchestra (which used no more than 49 musicians when performing), Sir András has chosen us, the conductor-less Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with our period instruments, for his recording of the two Brahms concertos at Abbey Roads Studios. He plays a historic grand piano built by the Leipzig firm of Julius Blüthner in 1859. The result is nothing less than an attempt ‘to recreate and restore the works, to cleanse the music and to liberate it from the burden of the – often questionable – trademarks of performing tradition’.

★★★★★ The Times
‘selfless communion with the composer’s genius’
Read the complete review here.

Gramophone
‘This is a disc that arrives with great expectations and delivers no less great revelations.’
Read the complete review here.

★★★★☆ The Guardian
‘The performances certainly cast new light on two of the greatest piano concertos in the repertoire’
Read the complete review here.

The New York Times
‘Words like monumental have a way of attaching themselves to these concertos, but Mr. Schiff and the outstanding players make them sound intimate and human-scale.’
Read the complete review here.

★★★★☆ The Financial Times
‘Both performances offer poetry and a strong sense of drive and purpose.’
Read the complete review here.

★★★★☆ BBC Classical Music
‘eloquence and grace’
Read the complete review here.

For more information about the CD and to buy a copy, please visit ECM Records
Alternatively, you can stream the recording on Tidal or Spotify.