The Infodad Team has a new review for Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and Fabio Bidini’s Brahms: Hungarian Dances recording:
“Listening to Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker’s performance on a new Delos CD is a tremendously involving and exhilarating experience, likely to make anyone familiar with this music wonder why Joachim’s transcription is not heard more often. … It may be that this version of the Hungarian Dances simply requires so much abandonment, such intensity of expression in old-fashioned Romany (Gypsy) mode, that only a violinist capable of merging over-the-top musical emoting with impeccable technique can bring the work off with genuine élan. Höpcker is an ideal exponent of the material: she is never dismissive of its folk-music and popular elements (most of the dances were probably Brahms’ arrangements of tunes he had heard rather than ones he himself composed), but neither does she try to make the dances overly serious or, heaven forfend, somber. … The best-known dances, such as Nos. 1 and 5, sound fresh and new in the hands of Höpcker and Bidini, while the less-known ones come into their own both as individual pieces and in the overall context of the set of 21. Surely every classical-music lover needs to have these dances in both their orchestral and piano-four-hands versions, and surely they are already a staple of many people’s collections. But this wonderful recording of a version that is just as valid as Brahms’ own comes close to being a must-have for anyone who loves this music: relatively few people will have heard the Hungarian Dancesthis way before, which means few will realize just how much they have been missing by not knowing what Joachim put into the material and what Höpcker has now extracted from it.”
—InfoDad Reviews
