Alexei Lubimov - Brahms: Fantasies, Rhapsodies, Intermezzi, Klavierstucke

From a cursory survey of this compositional output, it is clear that Johannes Brahms is a figure unto himself. Piano music, although an important area for him, by no means dominates. For an artist who considered that as a composer he had been 'born too late', who cultivated Baroque and Classical forms and was perceived by his peers as a traditionalist, in these late compositions he spoke in an utterly Romantic voice--highly subjective, strikingly intimate, unabashedly individual and original, aesthetically refined and ... boundlessly sad, for such is the common denominator of his late works.