Brahms: Hungarian Dances / Joachim: Variations in E minor

The forty-year friendship between Brahms and Joseph Joachim, violinist and composer, was one of the most significant and fruitful relationships in nineteenth-century music. Their admiration of each other’s artistry was profound and unwavering, and bore sustained creative fruit on Brahms’s side of which his Violin Concerto and Double Concerto are only the most famous examples.

Joachim’s transcriptions of Brahms’s famous Hungarian Dances—originally written for piano duet or solo piano—are technically challenging for any violinist, and superbly idiomatic, constituting a kind of gypsy ‘Art of the Violin’. They represent the summit of Brahms’s ‘Hungarian’ art, and Joachim’s powers of transcription match them with violin writing of the greatest fastidiousness and authentic feeling. The brilliant Hagai Shaham, acclaimed for his recordings of Hubay, is the ideal performer.