Brahms: 21 Hungarian Dances Woo 1 – David Boldrini

Brahms is an extremely well-known composer who certainly does not need a long presentation, nor have his works ever gone unnoticed in the great sea that is today’s international concertism. Yet, there are compositions still unexplored today, even if tremendously known. To live this particular contradiction are certainly his Hungarian Dances in their original version for 4 hands piano which, divided into 4 books and composed in two different years, represent perhaps the best known melodies to which the author is associated but which almost never they are actually proposed just as the author, or rather, reviser, had originally intended them. Another contradiction would be that almost none of these melodies were actually composed by Brahms himself, if not in some cases, but the name of Brahms was such that they were immediately associated with him directly, after all the mimicry in which he himself fell into Hungarian repertoire in many other compositions was such that these musics did not differ much from the rhythms that could often be heard in his other chamber compositions such as, for example, the piano quartets. Be that as it may, these works by now have a precise place in the common imagination as a genuinely authentic work and moreover they maintain a Brahmsian imprint so strong that even listening to the melody from which it is taken it is sometimes hard to recognize the matrix from which he set off. To propose them in their full version is a 4-handed piano duo that has been playing and interpreting these compositions for years: the pianist David Boldrini and the pianist Manila Santini. Both bring their now more than proven experience to these pages, proposing an almost unique interpretative idea today, built on levels of muscularity, virtuosity and precision, aspects that make these dances alive as never before. The two pianists are able to perfectly evoke the “dancing” and “popular” nature of each piece, born within a tradition that the concert hall has gradually “washed out” and embellished and which instead finds here the its primeval nature linked to the earth and to the people who lived in it.