The Fitters Workshop, Canberra Glassworks
May 7, 2015

The Canberra International Festival has hit its stride as it approaches its second weekend, with Artistic Director Roland Peelman’s inaugural programme offering a myriad of musical delights across the nation’s capital. Yesterday evening at the festival’s main performance hub, the Fitters Workshop at the Canberra Glassworks, a twilight concert marked the 181st birthday of the great icon of Romantic music, Johannes Brahms, featuring six musician from the stable of international artists imported for the festival.

Kicking off the birthday celebrations, Daniel de Borah delivered a sensitively considered account of the Three Intermezzi from Brahms’ last substantial volume of keyboard pieces, the Op. 119 Klavierstücke. These three pieces are a sublimely eloquent distillation of Brahms’ harmonic and gestural language; all superfluous rhetoric and arbitrary theatrics are stripped away, and de Borah’s thoughtful, intelligent delivery was perfectly suited to achieving the ideal equilibrium of musical clarity and emotional restraint. This was a display of sophisticated musical artistry, free from overly flashy interpretative arrogance or unnecessary physical hyperbole. Paired with this deeply respectful reverence for the music, de Borah also carefully understood the architecture of Brahms’ composition, and he made some very savvy and...