your comments do give a very different view of the music of Brahms (and Schumann) to the one that I have held for a life-time.
Which I hope is OK...
the suggestion that analytic thinking is anathema to emotional thinking can't be taken very seriously. (I also would be very surprised if Ollie was indeed suggesting it.)
Indeed I wasn't. One can give an analytical performance of pretty much anything. One can also give an emotional performance of pretty much anything. The thing with Brahms to me is that making yourself do what's on the page instead of playing the music 'how you think it should go' can actually make it all the more emotionally powerful. I've had the pleasure of playing the clarinet sonatas and the trio with some like-minded friends and when we've played it in exactly the kind of way I mentioned (doing all those little articulations instead of trying to make one big line out of it, displacing the accents to the beginnings of the slurs, etc) is when it's been the most overwhelming.
