Brahms Quotes

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.

That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.

I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.