Alexander Sitkovetsky, Yura Lee, Gary Hoffman, and Wu Qian play a chamber masterpiece by Strauss

This concert at New York’s Lincoln Center traverses the spectacular musical landscape of German Romanticism with a chamber music masterwork by Richard Strauss. 

Strauss’s majestic Piano Quartet was composed at the tender age of 20 when he had recently finished his Second Symphony, at a time when his work bore the clear influence of German Romantics like Brahms—but in the words of critic Arthur Johnstone, Strauss "shows himself a better Brahmsian than Brahms" in the quartet, "avoiding all his model’s worst faults." The work’s considerable success surprised even the composer himself, who did not consider it to be either "a pleasing or seductive score." After a musical tribute to Brahms, the quartet’s lively finale is typical of Strauss in his element, foreshadowing the mature Strauss sound that would evolve in the decades to come.