× Disc 4 celebrates the Creative Capitals of Berlin and Vienna with music by the incomparable Germanic titans Beethoven and Brahms. Beethoven composed his first two cello sonatas as an honorable offering to the King of Prussia, King Friedrich Wilhelm II, an amateur cellist, whose throne sat in the vital cultural center of Berlin. Nearly seventy years later, Brahms would compose his epic Piano Quintet in f minor while residing in the city of Vienna, the indisputable capital of the Western musical world.