In Rückblick, Campanella turns his exceptional gifts to the music of Brahms, with the Klavierstücke Opp. 76, 118 and 119. In these pieces, Campanella finds a perfect balance between Brahms’s poetry and his formal organisation, suggesting in his liner notes that it is in this relationship that we find the key to Brahms’s musical personality. Campanella argues that in the later works especially, Brahms’s avoidance of larger-scale forms such as the piano sonata was a conscious turning inwards, allowing space for “emotional investigations into the subtlest ripples of his shadowy sensitivity”.
