Evening Music

Brahm's Beautiful Lament

Sunday, April 04, 2004

Brahms wrote his Trio for Piano, Violin, and Horn within months of his mother's death, so some biographers believe it to be a lament in her memory. The third movement is marked Adagio mesto (sad), and one of Brahms’s favorite folk melodies appears and reappears "like a lost memory emerging from the distant mists of time," as biographer Max Kalbeck put it. Whatever the origin, the result is Brahms at his best. Vincent d'Indy once said, "Melody alone never grows old." And he proves it in his exuberant "Symphony on a French Mountain Air," performed for us by pianist Francois-Joel Thiollier with the Ireland National Symphony, conducted by Antonio de Almeida. Keep listening, or you'll miss a Schubert song and some German dances, as well as other musical bonbons.
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