CD: Brahms: Intermezzi Op 117; Piano Pieces Op 118 and 119: Lars Vogt

In his last three sets of piano pieces, all unnecessary rhetoric is purged from Brahms's music. There is no hectoring or lecturing, no celebration of virtuosity for its own sake. Lars Vogt is the perfect kind of thoughtful, unflashy pianist for emotionally contained world; his playing never attempts to impose his own interpretative ideas on music that has its own organic coherence.

Even in the E flat Rhapsody that ends Op 119 - the last piano music that Brahms ever wrote - there is a containment about Vogt's approach, so that the quiet eloquence of the three intermezzi that precede it in the set is never forgotten. This is excellent Brahms playing in which the pervading nostalgia of the pieces is exactly balanced against their constant reinvention of a harmonic language that seems, at least on the surface, to be so conventional.