Ilkley Baptist

Opus 34 is the Piano Quintet, and I fulfilled a long-held ambition recently, when I played two of its movements as part of a chamber music group, this week.

Playing the piano is an immediately satisfying thing - you produce the whole piece of music yourself. But it's lonely. You generally make music alone. I've long wanted to play with other musicians and, through the kindness of a friend, was recently introduced to a group of local amateur musicians. The pianist was happy to move over for two of the movements and let me have my first go at doing this sort of thing. It was wonderful. Exciting, challenging, tense and joyful all at once.

And what a piece to start with! Brahms' Piano Quintet is a piece I've known since my teens. It's one of Brahms' unruly early works that, like the First Piano Concerto, didn't easily find its best form. It is a powerful, complex and rich piece. I played for the two inner movements, the slow second, and the driving Scherzo. That's an incredibly exciting movement, with relentless rhythms breaking into emphatic march-like tunes, and a middle section (Trio I suppose, though it's not in triple time) that contains one of those typically Brahmsian broad tunes. Mellowness multiplied.