Chamber Concert – Brahms and Beach

Brahms’s Piano Quintet, composed in 1864, is an important chamber music work from the Romantic era. In the early twentieth century, the American pianist and composer Amy Beach wrote a piano quintet that was strongly inspired by Brahms’s quintet. You can certainly hear the influence, yet it is nevertheless a completely different work.

At this concert, Professor Henrik Brendstrup (cello) and Associate Professor Nicolas Sublét (violin), together with eight of their students, present the two quintets side by side. This offers a rare opportunity to hear how composers influence one another and how we, as listeners, can experience similar musical ideas in different ways.

The story behind

In 1900, Amy Beach performed Brahms’s Piano Quintet in Boston. A few years later, she composed a piano quintet of her own. The connection between the two works is particularly tangible: in her quintet, Beach takes up a theme from the finale of Brahms’s work, allowing it to reappear and evolve throughout her own composition.

Yet it would be reductive to see Beach’s Quintet simply as an extension of Brahms’s. What is truly fascinating is what Beach does with what she has heard. A work we encounter inevitably becomes something else when it passes through another musician’s sensibility, imagination, and musical language. In Beach’s hands, Brahms’s theme is no longer quite the same: it is transformed, displaced, brought into dialogue with other ideas, and given a new meaning within a musical world that is unmistakably her own.

This is also what makes the pairing of these two quintets so compelling. We first hear Brahms’s music, and then what Amy Beach took from it, transformed and reimagined. Two works can be connected without one serving as the explanation or model for the other. Instead, they offer two ways of inhabiting the same tradition, two musical imaginations, two ways of allowing an idea to travel from one work to another.

Perhaps this is also something fundamental to listening itself: like Amy Beach, each of us receives a work through our own particular lens. What we hear is never quite the same as what another listener hears. Music continues to live through this diversity of perspectives and experiences—and that diversity is itself a source of richness.

Educational Development Project

The concert is free, and you can just show up without a ticket. Please come early.