Brahms - Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2 review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

András Schiff/Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
(ECM, two CDs)
Having gone back to the original manuscripts, Schiff’s work belongs in the front rank of recent recordings

“With the present recording we have tried to recreate and restore the works, to cleanse and detoxify the music”, writes András Schiff in the liner notes for his new Brahms disc. “To liberate it from the burden of the – often questionable – trademarks of performing tradition.” By playing the two concertos on a restored Blüthner piano made in Leipzig around 1859, together with the gut strings and 19th-century wind of the 50-strong Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Schiff’s aim was to get to back to the sound and scale of the performances that the composer himself would have expected. One of Brahms’s favourite orchestras, apparently, was Hans von Bülow’s band in Meiningen, which had just 49 players.