Neville Cardus wrote in 1927 – just 30 years after Brahms’s death – that he could ‘think of no composer whose future is safer and surer than Brahms’s; everyone can find a point of contact.’ Those points of contact are inevitably multifarious. Wuthering Heights (published in 1847) is treasured at large as a love story despite containing nothing that most of us would recognise as love but instead presenting to us the appalling consequences of ungovernable passion. Such passion is not such much buried beneath the surface of Brahms’s music as transmuted into dramas without words. André Gide made the nice distinction between Wagner where ‘each emotion is full of notes’, and Chopin where ‘each note is full of emotion’; Brahms is with Chopin. The symphonies may defend the old ways of doing things against Wagner’s seductive translation of human relationships into musical dramas, but they are still ‘brimful of vigour, drama and a driving passion’ (Sir John Eliot Gardiner). We are challenged by both Bronte and Brahms to answer why such passion, far removed from quotidian life, so holds us in its thrall. Not for nothing could Arnold Schoenberg align himself with the golden thread of German music by writing extensively of ‘Brahms the Progressive’ 50 years after the members of Brahms’s choir in Vienna complained that he programmed too much old music. 

This reference edition is a worthy complement to the superb complete or almost-complete sets on Brilliant Classics of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and more, with all Brahms’s major works and very many more obscure ones, in performances by renowned musicians that have often received glowing reviews when first issued. It’s another unmissable set from Brilliant.