The Complete Piano Sonatas of Johannes Brahms, aca Digital CM20099 In The Complete Piano Sonatas of Johannes Brahms, American pianist, John Noel Roberts makes a compelling case for a Brahms genre we don’t get to hear often enough. We hear Sonatas 1-3 recorded so infrequently as a set, in fact, that it’s hard to assess their importance in the composer’s whole body of work. Roberts’ strongly characterized performances strike just the right note. They are robust without losing any of the vital details in the music. Roberts’ tone is firm, particularly in the opening movements where Brahms derives maximum sonority from widely spaced chords. He does a wonderful job of following the contours of Brahms’ well- formed melodies, and he avoids any trace of self-conscious dramatics. His grasp of the rhythmical profiles of these three early works, in which romantic feeling finds its perfect correlative in classical sonata-form as reinterpreted by Brahms, is particularly striking. The substantial “fillers’ on Disc 2 of this 2-CD slimline are Brahms’ Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1 and his Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op35. Book 1. Dynamic, exhilarating, and never entirely predictable, they add to a very satisfying program in Roberts’ well-paced interpretations. The sound quality of the recordings, engineered and edited by Fred Horton for aca Digital, capture all the essential details in the music in a warm, natural perspective.