Johannes Brahms’s First Piano Concerto—much of which he composed, in an early form, in 1854, at the age of twenty-one, and completed four years later—is, to my ear, the piece in the standard classical repertory that, more than any other, boils over with the wild energies of youth, with its big dreams and big joys, big sorrows and big ideas, and abrupt eruptions of mixed emotion. It’s a work of Brahms’s own rhapsodically stormy youth, and it reflects a flamboyant, defiant musical swagger. Though already awed by Beethoven’s colossal achievements, Brahms put his concerto out into the world with seeming bravado—as if to say, “My First Piano Concerto is longer, harder, and meatier than Beethoven’s”—and took up his predecessor’s gauntlet by composing it in D minor, the key of Beethoven’s titanic Ninth Symphony...
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