Hungarian Dance No.5 in G minor (arr.Parlow)

Hungarian gypsy music was as liberating an influence on some nineteenth-century composers as jazz on some twentieth-century composers. Brahms succombed to it, its distinctive rhythms and exotic harmonies, when he met Eduard Reményi, a slightly disreputable but persuasive Hungarian violinst who gave several concerts with the young composer in the early 1850s. When Brahms started writing his own Hungarian Dances for piano duet in 1858, while there were other sources he could have drawn on, he no doubt remembered the Hungarian pieces that had made such an impression on him when he heard Reményi play them. Certainly, when the first two sets Hungarian Dances were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of stealing the tunes from him.

The Hungarian Dance No.5 in G minor - unfortunately not one of the three that the composer orchestrated himself - is a particularly brilliant example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in the Hungarian gypsy idiom: the fervent melodies, the vigorous rhythms and the syncopations, hesitations and delays that so effectively offset them.