Philippe Cassard (piano)Accord 480 3412 ****

For a while now, Rachmaninov has usurped Brahms in the affection of pianists, at least insofar as the two composers’ solo piano works feature in concert programmes. And, perhaps as a consequence, the performing habits engendered by Rachmaninov’s texturally rich but often harmonically static writing are all-too-often applied to Brahms’s harmonically much more complex music.

Philippe Cassard is something of an old-school player when it comes to Brahms. He’s fully at home with the finely detailed motivic working that caused Schoenberg to write about Brahms “the progressive”. He goes easy on the nudging rubato that’s often used to ensure an aura of profundity in the slower pieces, and his multi-layered interest serves the music’s lighter moments very well. The recording, made in the Curtis Auditorium of the new Cork School of Music, sounds full and warm. See philippecassard.com