Gather: Concert Program VI

With the three piano trios published as his Opus 1, Beethoven put the musical world on notice: though nominally a student of Haydn, a radical new voice had emerged, destined to alter the course of Western music forever. Beethoven’s legacy would fuel the composers of the Romantic generation—none more so than Johannes Brahms, whose winsome Liebeslieder Waltzes and shattering Piano Quartet no. 3 encapsulate the era’s expressive extremes. Shostakovich’s powerful Piano Quintet reveals the embers of Romanticism burning unceasingly into the twentieth century.