Benjamin Grosvenor & Friends: Strauss & Brahms

Violinist Hyeyoon Park, viola player Timothy Ridout, cellist Kian Soltani and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor have formed an ongoing piano quartet.

Tonight they take the stage to perform two rollercoaster masterworks by Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms.

Strauss’ Piano Quartet is a stormy, adventurous piece showing the composer full of youthful passion and bravado. You can hear his roots in the influence of Brahms and Beethoven, but also the soaring melodies and rich textures that later came to characterise his orchestral tone-poems.

The Brahms C minor Piano Quartet is the most dramatic of the composer’s three. After first drafting it in the heat of his youthful unrequited passion for Clara Schumann, when he related it to the story of Goethe’s Werther, Brahms revised it much later. The result is music of rugged, uncompromising magnificence.