Brahms: Piano Pieces Op 116, 117, 118 & 119; Markus Groh

Markus Groh has built a considerable reputation as a Liszt interpreter, and his recording of the composer's B minor sonata and Totentanz was widely admired. For his follow-up he has gone to the opposite pole of late 19th-century German romantic piano music, to the intensely intimate and intensely understated world of Brahms's late pieces. There's much to admire in Groh's playing of these four sets - rearranged on the disc so it begins with the three intermezzi of Op 117 and ends with the set of four pieces of Op 119 - especially the beautifully judged palette of keyboard colours with which he shades these exquisite pieces. At times the quiet inwardness of the music escapes him - he's more at home, for instance, with the comparative extroversion of the Rhapsodie with which Op 119 ends, than with the delicately pearled intermezzo with which the set opens - and not everything in these pieces unfolds with the naturalness and expressive breadth that they ideally need. But Groh's playing has a musicality and honesty that almost compensates for the self-satisfied interview that serves as sleeve notes to the disc.