Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25

Brahms's First Piano Quartet (1861), the work he played at his first Vienna concert, is one of the most passionate and turbulent pieces in the chamber music repertoire. The opening Allegro drives forward with an urgency that the young Brahms rarely matched elsewhere, its syncopations and dense counterpoint creating an almost symphonic weight. The Intermezzo's hovering, otherworldly atmosphere and the Andante con moto's Hungarian-inflected lyricism show Brahms at his most introspective, while the finale's rondo alla zingarese — a Hungarian-Romani dance of ferocious energy — brought the house down at every early performance and still does today. The work is doubly famous through Schoenberg's brilliant 1937 orchestration, which revealed the latent symphonic ambitions of every passage.