This CD is dedicated to the most personal vein of Brahms, to that musical intimacy that dwells in him from the works of youth to the works of extreme old age. A melancholy tenderness deeply rooted in his soul on which (and, at times, against which) the Hamburg composer built all his rigorous creative teaching. On the one hand, one of the many manifestations of romanticism, on the other the classical Beethoven heritage and the great tradition of counterpoint (Bach, but also masters more distant in time). The realization of the great forms (symphonies, concerts, sonatas, variations, the major chamber works, the Requiem) often takes place in Brahms through long and troubled gestations, studded with trials, errors, second thoughts: his masterpieces of larger dimensions reveal, among their folds, an incessant eff ort to perfect. Despite the chronological distance of the proposed works, a red thread connects them: the taste for a lean writing style that evokes solemn and tragic atmospheres; the deep lyrical sweetness, the sense of a pressing and inexorable destiny, a certain irony and almost unsettling playfulness, but, above all, a calm and resigned melancholy that reveals his deepest voice to us.