Author: vin
Date: 2014-07-24 07:41
Brahms' quote in the above link that poco forte is "the character of forte...with the sound of piano" was relayed, I believe, by Diran Alexanian. Now, of course, with anything fourth hand we should be skeptical, but as Karl alluded to, this isn't the same as mf. Brahms could have written mezzo forte, but he chose to write something else. As with the discussion about espressivo elsewhere, it is very helpful if we think about character and color and not just volume. If we are only thinking about volume, poco forte is a fairly confusing marking (after all, why not mf), but if you start looking for the marking in other Brahms works and think about its use on a color/character dimension, you start to understand a little more about what it is.
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