Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Paganini, (Kissin)

Brahms was not a showman, and rarely wrote music which aimed at being technically difficult. But when he did, he out-Liszted Liszt. The Paganini Variations, as you can tell from their main title, are not just a fully-fledged concert work but also a set of exercises for study, featuring technical challenges that are often more than a little obscene [19:24]. As always, the variations are also musically dazzling in their variety and invention. Kissin plays the faster variations with astounding bravura, [11:29