First, the instruments themselves, both from Washington’s Smithsonian Museum – the legendary Stradivarius once owned by the great Belgian cellist, Adrien-Francois Servais, and the Steinway concert grand used by Paderewski throughout his 1892-3 American tour. Their immediately ear-catching sonority is reproduced with exemplary clarity: the 20-bit technology used for this “high definition sound” even picks up Bylsma’s every intake of breath at moments of heightened intensity, and there’s no shortage of those.
That said, I suspect there has never been a real love-affair between Bylsma and Brahms, such as he admits to having enjoyed (in an idiosyncratic introductory note) with romantics like Schumann and Liszt. In other words, it’s the classical Brahms he salutes here rather than interposing cajolings of his own between composer and listener.
I enjoyed the E minor Sonata for its unflaggingly strong and purposeful sense of direction, and the close interplay of both instruments in revealing so many subtleties of craftsmanship. And with what magical shafts of light Orkis illumines texture that can so easily emerge clotted. Only in the (at times) almost orchestral vehemence of the keyboard contribution to the F major Sonata’s opening movement does his large concert grand occasionally dominate. Its rapt Adagio, though of intimate refinement, is surely marginally too fast for its affettuoso to speak as it can. The trio of the Scherzo in its turn confirmed an earlier suspicion that Brahms’s warm melodies sometimes call for more vibrato than Bylsma is willing to concede. And should the finale, although admittedly marked alla breve, allegro molto, really be dismissed in a mere three-and-a-half minutes?
In compensation, the disc brings the bonus of Schumann’s endearing Funf Stucke im Volkston, where both of these distinguished artists allow fantasy its full, free rein.'