Philipp Kopachevsky made his Piano Classics debut in 2016 with an ambitious selection of late Scriabin and Liszt, and Bryce Morrison in Gramophone was impressed: ‘haunting in confidentiality… no less powerful in storm and stress… never less than sensitive.’

Now he places those qualities of sensitive pianism at the service of Brahms, with another innovatively programmed album that effectively bookends the composer’s career and with it, the latter course of 19th‐century German Romanticism. At one end is the Beethovenian muscularity of the Sonata op.5, which the 20‐year‐old Brahms wrote in a white heat of inspiration following an initial encounter with Clara Schumann that would change the course of his life, personal and professional.

Every bar of the Sonata burns with longing and passion thwarted, even the Andante tellingly prefaced with lines from the Romantic poet Sternau: ‘The twilight falls, the moonlight gleams, two hearts in love unite, embraced in rapture’. Almost four decades later, Brahms signed off as a composer with the more subtle and even playful spirit of a sublimely allusive quartet of opus numbers, the three Intermezzi op.117, the seven Fantasias op.116 and the two sets of mixed genre-pieces that make up opp. 118 and 119. These demand the most refined command of phrasing and harmony – at points they come closer than any other work of Brahms to casting loose from the anchor of tonality and anticipating the world of Schoenberg, for whom Brahms was an exemplar – and are eminently suited to a pianist such as Kopachevsky who has already proved himself at home in the twilit world of Liszt and Scriabin, in music on the brink of extinction. A richly rewarding release for all lovers of Romantic piano music and another feather in the cap of a superb young pianist.