Blüthner

Pizarro's acclaimed second disc of Beethoven sonatas, beautifully played on a Blüthner piano. Beethoven's last three sonatas mark a culmination in the classical-romantic sonata form, and Beethoven's farewell to the genre. Pizarro explains: "Beethoven not only aesthetically and emotionally heralds the arrival of the Romantic Age in music but also profoundly alters what had been the accepted parameters of sonata form. Man has become the centre of the universe as can be heard through the outpouring of emotion, as human condition and the circle of human life is depicted in these three works.

“My enthusiasm for Brahms goes back to my youth, and the piano concertos are largely responsible for it,” writes Sir András Schiff in a liner note for this remarkable new recording. It finds the great pianist reassessing interpretive approaches to Brahms in the inspired company of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. To fully bring out the characteristics of Brahms’s music Schiff’s choice of instrument is a Blüthner piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which the D minor concerto was premiered. The historically informed Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays with the flexibility, attitude, and responsiveness of a chamber music ensemble, as they work without a conductor, listening attentively to each other. András Schiff’s collaboration with the orchestra in a series of concerts was widely acclaimed: “Brahms’s First Piano Concerto was reborn thanks to the OAE’s incisive playing and András Schiff’s characterful phrasing”, The Guardian exclaimed. The musicians’ mutual wish to recapture the experience led to the present double album, recorded in London in December 2019.