In the autumn of 1870, the Haydn scholar and biographer Carl Ferdinand Pohl showed Brahms the unpublished manuscripts of six woodwind suites that were believed to be the work of Joseph Haydn. (Their provenance would be disputed in the 20th century, and they can now be attributed with some certainty to the composer and piano maker Ignaz Pleyel). Brahms' attention was drawn to a divertimento for wind Octet in B-flat major, and in particular to a movement based on an apparently traditional melody bearing the inscription "Chorale St. Antoni”. Three years later, in the summer of 1873, Brahms would decide to make use of the theme in a series of variations. He would write two separate versions, one for two pianos, and one for orchestra. The second, which is the first ever standalone series of variations for orchestra (meaning the first which did not form part of some larger work) would receive its première in November 1873, in Vienna, with the composer on the podium. The work was very well-received. The two-piano version was performed in public for the first time on 10 February 1874.

The German composer combines a prolific melodic inventiveness with an elaborate (often contrapuntal) treatment of the material, drawing a host of radically different ideas from elements of the theme in a most imaginative way. The first five variations ratchet up the tension, which is ultimately dispelled in the fast and dynamic sixth. A pastoral siciliana follows, while the grand extended finale is based on an old form much loved by Brahms: the Passacaglia, which involves repeating a theme (five bars long in this case) then building variations on it. Brahms would actually use the same form some years later in the imposing finale of his Fourth Symphony.

The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski received his piano diploma from the Warsaw Conservatoire in 1936 and his diploma in composition the year after that. In 1938, he completed his military service and was about to continue his studies in Paris under Nadia Boulanger when, in mid-1939, Poland declared a general conscription and the composer found himself back in the army, serving as a non-commissioned officer. He was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht near the town of Lublin, but managed to escape eight days later and return to Warsaw. Lutoslawski remained in Warsaw until 1944, earning a living playing music in cafés, first with a group of musicians and later with Andrzej Panufnik, who would later (like Lutoslawski) establish himself as one of Poland's greatest post-war composers. For their performances in the cafés and cabarets of wartime Warsaw, Lutoslawski and Panufnik would transcribe or arrange pieces of popular music – some 200 in all – for two pianos. Lutoslawski fled the city in a hurry with his mother shortly before the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. He was only able to take a handful of his manuscripts with him. The works that made it out of Warsaw included the drafts for his First Symphony, a few works from his student years, and his Variations on a Theme by Paganini, which he had written in 1941 for use in his cabaret performances. (All the manuscripts that got left behind were destroyed along with Warsaw.) So if was by sheer luck that these Variations on Niccolò Paganini's famous 24th Caprice for solo violin survived to become one of the most popular pieces ever for two pianos. Lutoslawski chose to write 12 variations and a coda, which proceed with few breaks, undiminished energy, clear rhythmic allusions to jazz, exhilarating parallel motion, humour and glittering virtuosity.

Sergei Rachmaninoff graduated in 1892 from the Moscow Conservatory, earning the institution’s highest distinction – the gold medal – for his one-act opera Aleko. The work caught the attention of the great Russian composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who arranged for it to be performed the following year by the Bolshoi Theatre, and also introduced the eighteen-year-old composer to his publisher. So it was with sincere gratitude that Rachmaninoff dedicated to Tchaikovsky his Suite for Two Pianos, Op.5, which he composed in the (highly creative) summer of 1893 and was his second work for two pianos. Accepting the dedication, Tchaikovsky had expressed his intention to attend the work's official première in Moscow, but died three weeks before it took place. The premiere went ahead on 30 November 1893, with the composer performing with another important pianist and composer, Pavel Pabst.

As their titles and the overall description of the Suite as a "Fantaisie-tableaux" reveal, all four movements are both musical renderings of images and connected conceptually with a particular poem. The opening Barcarolle was inspired by the poem of the same name by Mikhail Lermontov. And one can indeed visualize, in the many light-fingered passages played on two pianos, a gondola calmly parting waters made golden by reflected sunlight. The gondolier is singing a love song, which is sometimes melancholic and sometimes joyful. The next movement begins with a simple pattern, like a leap, which is followed by a series of slow arpeggios. This highly sensual music conveys the atmosphere of a love poem by Lord Byron, with the tender whispered declarations of the heart that lovers exchange in the perfumed night as a nightingale sings its heart out somewhere close at hand. The Russian romantic poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev is the author of the poem linked to the third part: the repeated four-note descending motif recalls tears ever-flowing, "like raindrops on an autumn evening". The Russian theologian and philosopher Alexei Khomiakov, whose ideas greatly influenced the Russian Orthodox personalist thinkers, wrote the poem "Easter” which provided Rachmaninoff with the inspiration for the Suite’s finale. Here, the pianos imitate the joyful, glorious ring of a bell chiming to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ with all the appropriate pomp and celebration.