Ian Hobson Performs Brahms Concert Series at Benzaquen Hall & Cary Hall, Beg. Tonight

The distinguished pianist and conductor Ian Hobson will perform fourteen recitals devoted to the complete solo piano and chamber music with piano of Johannes Brahms. The series is entitled "Johannes Brahms: Classical Inclinations in a Romantic Age." Concerts take place at Benzaquen Hall and Cary Hall in New York City's DiMenna Center tonight, September 10 and September 12, 24, 26; October 1, 3, 8, 10, 22, 24, and November 5, 7, 12, 14, all at 7:30 p.m.

Mr. Hobson will be joined by a wide range of collaborators, including such noted musicians as Samir Golescu, Claude Hobson, Edward A. Rath, Jr. and Rochelle Sennet, pianos; Andrés Cárdenes and Igor Kalnin, violins; Csaba Erdélyi, viola; Ko Iwasaki and Dmitry Kouzov, cellos; Bernhard Scully, horn, and J. David Harris, clarinet.

A dedicated master of the core piano repertoire, Maestro Hobson has cultivated a discography of some 60 releases, including the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schumann and a complete edition of Brahms's variations for piano. Maestro Hobson's recent ongoing recording projects include a 16-volume edition of the complete works of Chopin, also for Zephyr; Maestro Hobson is the first to record the composer's entire oeuvre as a single artist. In 2010 Mr. Hobson brought a 10-recital series, The Heritage and Legacy of Chopin & Schumann, to New York's Dicapo Opera Theatre, in collaboration with piano authority David Dubal, to great success. Of the third recital in the series, The New York Times critic Allan Kozinn had this to say: "Mr. Hobson played the Moscheles pieces in the bright, showy spirit in which they were written and threw himself into Chopin's Etudes with energy and a sense of shifting color and weight... He opened the program with Beethoven's Sonata No.28 in A (Op. 101) in a reading that that began as a calm rumination, with a velvety melodic line that sailed over the more involved accompaniment, and evolved into an impassioned, texturally dense torrent of assertive counterpoint."