Brahms: Complete Variations for Solo Piano – review

Garrick Ohlsson includes six sets of Brahms's variations in his survey, though only two of them, the Variations and Fugue on a theme by Handel, Op 24, and the Paganini Variations, Op 35, are well known and appear regularly in recital programmes nowadays. But another work here, the D minor Theme and Variations, will be familiar to chamber-music lovers as the great slow movement of the Op 18 string sextet; Brahms made this piano transcription as a birthday present for Clara Schumann in 1860. These early variations are light years away from the intimacy of Brahms's late piano pieces, and Ohlsson's iron-clad technique and robust, forward tone generally suit them well. But there are times when a bit more delicacy might be welcome, especially in some of the more reflective of the Handel variations and in the genuinely tragic and inexplicably neglected Variations on a Theme of Schumann, Op 9, composed not long after Schumann had been committed to an asylum, and dedicated to Clara.