Music for Wine Lovers: Vintage Classics

The beautiful music of Haydn provides dramatic contrast to these great operatic moments. Haydn s quartets are some of his most personal musical statements. He composed them in groups throughout his life. Op20, from which our two selections are taken, are early works, and their gentle simplicity belies their precisely wrought form and clear, well-constructed counterpoint, in which each of the four string instruments plays an equal part. The Divertimento in C is a stunning piece. In contrast to the equal voices of the quartets, here the piano is definitely a solo instrument, with a gentle, unobtrusive accompaniment.

We couldn t resist finishing a Wine Lovers CD with a bit of Brahms and Liszt. The Brahms Sextet doubles the richness of the Haydn quartet texture by the addition of only two extra instruments. Classic Brahms is always like this: yearning music, urgent at times, particularly in the central section, but wrapped up in music of immense beauty and technically perfect, of course. The Liszt piano piece receives an outstanding interpretation from Louis Kentner, one of the twentieth century s most outstanding players. As in the Brahms, the music surges to a majestic climax before finishing in the subdued tones reminiscent of a summer evening enjoyed, we hope, with a fine glass of wine or two!