Hyeyoon Park / Timothy Ridout / Kian Soltani / Benjamin Grosvenor

Their programme features Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1, whose final movement – a »Rondo alla zingarese« – is an expression of the Hamburg composer’s great love of Hungarian folk music. Brahms crafted these driving rhythms, stylised melodies and the ludicrously fast csárdas finale so finely that even his Hungarian composer friend Joseph Joachim ungrudgingly admitted that Brahms had given him a »sound thrashing« on his own territory – high praise indeed!

Before that, the musicians perform works by the British composer Frank Bridge and the Frenchman Gabriel Fauré, both of whom described their music in terms of the »fantastical«: Bridge, in that he called his work a »Phantasy«, and Fauré in that he repeatedly emphasised that his music was written to take people as far away as possible from their everyday lives.