Description
A precious bond exists between Johannes Brahms and the four-hand piano repertoire. It has often been held that his pages thought for two pianists at the same keyboard were sketches, a sort of preliminary “cartoons” for the rich musical “fresco” that was to ensue; the sense of those works was different, though. They were not simple preliminary versions, but alternatives: they did put to test forms and structures in sight of a future elaboration, but they also fully honored the expressive capabilities of the piano. Even when Brahms seemed instead to be approaching the four-hand “reduction”, that is to say transcriptions that took the opposite way, by rendering playable on a single piano a composition previously published in an ensemble version, for the sake of education or profit, the result was the same: the creation of a parallel to the pristine work, one that was independent from it.
