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Brahms: Piano Works on CD

The album you hold in your hands charts a journey that is, in more than one sense, the cartography of a life. Not only does it span both the first and one of the last piano works of Johannes Brahms, but beneath it's design lies a deeper meditation on the nature of time.

The young Italian pianist Elia Cecino does not merely confront the pianistic and expressive challenges of these works; he assumes the role of a narrator, shaping, through the poetry of sound, a tale of fullness and nostalgia, of youth and age, of promises and memories dissolving into the ether. The Sonata No. 1, written in the ardor of youth, still resounds with echoes of Beethoven-it opens with a direct citation from the Hammerklavier-revealing a Brahms who raises his voice with impassioned fervor, boldly claiming the great classical legacy with the audacity of one who knows he has something to say. At the heart of the program, the Variations on a Theme by Schumann dwell in a space of reverence and sorrow, where a more mature Brahms converses with his friend and mentor in a gesture of tribute and love, of confidences and affinities, of encounters and brotherhood. Finally, the Pieces, Op. 119 transport us to a realm where the urgency of performance and virtuosity has given way to the most intimate contemplation, a kind of personal, confessional journal, in which every note is almost a whisper, a thought suspended in time.

Through these three great works, Elia traces the arc of a life and, in doing so, invites us to share in the experience of an entire existence in each listening-to traverse, in little more than an hour, the distance that separates youth from twilight, certainty from doubt, fullness from farewell.