“These late works by Brahms are like a testament. But what is this secretive man revealing to us here? Or rather, what is he still trying to hide? Hiding it until the very end, arousing in us an irresistible desire to guess what it is? Perhaps that is where the beauty of these scores lies.” – Piotr Anderzewski

A short album, a selection of jewels from Brahms’s late piano works (Opp. 116 to 119, with Op.119 no.4 being the last piano piece Brahms ever wrote) proposed in a carefully chosen order. 

Brahms’s Opp. 116 to 118 represent the composer’s late piano works, written during the final decade of his life (1892–1893). Here we find a more mature,  intimate and subtle Brahms, far removed from the roaring Romanticism of his earlier works. It is as if these pieces serve as a personal testament.

“Piotr Anderszewski is one of the leading pianists of our time,” wrote The Guardian in 2024 after a recital at the Barbican in London. On the programme were six of the 12 pieces on this album, all dating from the last years of Johannes Brahms’s life: 10 intermezzi, a capriccio and a rhapsody. “Even by Anderszewski’s meticulous standards [the recital] was an exceptional event,” continued the Guardian. “The miniatures were shaped into a glowing sequence … Anderszewski’s ability to crystallise a whole expressive world in microcosm was extraordinary… The Brahms pieces were a selection from the sets of op 116 to 119 … Anderszewski treated each intermezzo as if it was a jewel, with not a note out of place, nor a chord not perfectly balanced.”

Brahms, who died in 1897 at the age of 63, wrote the pieces on this album in 1892 and 1893. In his note for the release, Anderszewski says that they “are like a last will and testament” and then asks, ”But what message do they contain, from such a secretive man?” The music is often reflective or elegiac in mood and Brahms even described the three Op.117 Intermezzi (two of which appear on the album) as “lullabies of my sorrows”.

As Anderszewski, characteristically thoughtful and frank, discussed in an interview for Musica Viva Australia in September 2025: “They are the last things he wrote for the piano – a kind of farewell … It’s cruel to think like this, but it’s very sad – [the pieces are] sort of the testimony of a failed life. You know Brahms’s motto: Frei aber einsam – free but lonely. He was someone who had recognition, who was respected, who led a comfortable life, didn’t struggle to survive, who had good friends – a fantastic composer – and yet something failed. I don’t know … this is what I feel in this music. It makes me very sad to play it.”