“But something often stirs and speaks deep within a person, almost unconsciously, and sometimes it manifests itself as poetry or music,” Johannes Brahms wrote in July 1896 to the daughters of his friend and confidante Clara Schumann, who had died the previous month at the age of 76. His Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), completed shortly before Clara’s death, now seemed like a dark foreboding of events. In their recital, Juliane Banse and Marcelo Amaral present Brahms’s musical reflection on the transience of human life together with Claude Debussy’s settings of equally ephemerous poems by Stéphane Mallarmé and works by Gabriel Fauré and André Caplet.