Johannes Brahms
Concertos

About Johannes Brahms's Concertos

Brahms made the first sketches for the dramatic opening of the first piano concerto just after the 1854 suicide attempt of his dear friend Robert Schumann, but was not able to complete the work until four years later. The ambition from the outset was to write a symphony, but Brahms felt himself too inexperienced and “haunted by the footsteps of a giant” (Beethoven).
At the premiere the audience hissed at the concerto, while critics labeled it "perfectly unorthodox, banal and horrid". The work’s symphonic origins reveal themselves in the fact that piano and orchestra are completely equal partners. Brahms draws on chamber music techniques and the Baroque Concerto Grosso form, an approach that he was to realize even more perfectly in the second concerto, a mature work finished more than twenty years later.