Brahms: Violin Sonatas 1-3

"Beautifully considered performances taking an expansive, romantic view. Brahms's three violin sonatas - all works of his middle years - make a perfect CD programme, especially when performed with such elegance, poetry and passion as Renaud Capuçon and Nicholas Angelich bring to their performances. Few composers worked so closely with so many fine violinists as Brahms, but it was his close friendship with Joseph Joachim that provided the impetus for these works - and, as often happens with Brahms, youthful players bring great rewards."
(Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine Nov 2005)

"…I enjoyed the A major, and was even more enthused by the D minor. …Capuçon and Nicholas Angelich are absolutely inside the music, completely responsive to the play of expressive light and shade, and the way this goes hand in glove with the unmatched intricacy and vitality of Brahms's rhythmic sense." BBC Music

Renaud Capuçon and Nicholas Angelich return to Brahms, and the three mature violin sonatas written between 1878 and 1888. The lyrical first sonata takes its subtitle from the song whose nostalgic theme appears in the outer movements; the radiant second and tougher third were both completed during happy summers spent on the shores of Lake Thun in Switzerland. The programme includes Brahms' youthful contribution to the collective F.A.E. Sonata, composed by Brahms, Dietrich and Schumann for the great Joseph Joachim in 1853.

[Brahms Piano Trios] 'The Capuçons and Angelich seem to think and breathe together so naturally that the performance feels instinctively truthful... Ravishingly beautiful.' CD Review