Beethoven Late Sonatas

Because Beethoven's late piano sonatas are universally revered, performances of these works often invite passionate disagreements about the proper way to interpret them. Such was the case with Maurizio Pollini's recordings (1975-1977), and the controversy surrounding them has never fully abated. While these performances are polished to an extent seldom realized on other recordings, it was this pristine quality itself that invited criticism.

This is a previously unpublished album including Beethoven's late masterpieces, Piano sonatas, Op.109 & 110 and Bach's uncommon Overture in the French Style, drawing inspiration from the French tradition of François Couperin and showcasing the perfect technique and musical inspiration of one of the greatest French pianists at his best.

Sony Classical is pleased to release the first ever collection of the great Zino Francescatti recordings for Columbia Masterworks. Various recording masterpieces have been newly transferred, mixed and re-mastered from the original analogue tapes using 24 bit technology. Included in the collection are stunning collaborations with some of the world’s best musicians, and composers.

Here comes the last album of Warner's Walter Gieseking retrospective with Beethoven’s late piano sonatas.

This is a previously unpublished album including Beethoven's late masterpieces, Piano sonatas, Op.109 & 110 and Bach's uncommon Overture in the French Style, drawing inspiration from the French tradition of François Couperin and showcasing the perfect technique and musical inspiration of one of the greatest French pianists at his best.

The first recording by the up-and-coming Takayuki Mihara is three of Beethoven's masterpiece piano sonatas. Dedicated to the memory of his former teacher Akiko Sugitani, who passed away suddenly in 2019, the piety that pervades the entire work adds depth to the music. ＜Takayuki Mihara graduated from Kaisei Junior High School and Senior High School, and received his B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Keio University. Later, she studied under Akiko Sugitani, who became her lifelong teacher. She was fascinated by the gentle yet powerful music of her teacher's piano playing, and under her guidance, pursued the pursuit of beautiful sound. She performed with the Prima Vista String Quartet and the Polish Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra, and became passionate about bringing out a variety of tones from the piano.

Born in Poland in 1949, Emanuel Ax moved with his family to Canada before settling in New York City in 1961. There, beginning in 1966, he studied piano with Mieczyslaw Munz at the Juilliard School of Music. He made a concert tour of South America in 1969; in the year that followed he completed a bachelor's degree in French at Columbia University and became an American citizen.

There are curiously few complete cycles of Beethoven's five sonatas for cello and piano, given that the five, unlike the violin sonatas, were almost equally distributed among the composer's early, middle, and late periods, and that each one was in its way a formally daring work. The last two sonatas in particular, with their mysteriously lyrical third relations and compact finales, fugal in the case of the Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102/2, might be regarded as having inaugurated Beethoven's late period.

Yevgeny Sudbin has previously recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos – releases which have received international acclaim, for instance on the website ClassicsToday.com: ‘A Beethoven experience you will not want to miss.’ For his first disc featuring solo works by Beethoven, Sudbin has chosen the two final sonatas and the Six Bagatelles, Op. 126 – late works written between 1821 and 1824, just a couple of years before the composer’s death. There are numerous anecdotes that testify to the fact that Beethoven was highly temperamental. But in his liner notes to this disc, Sudbin writes of another, contrasting side to the composer: ‘warmth, generosity and wisdom – with unexpected outbursts of cheeky humour – are also unmistakably among Beethoven’s qualities and particularly evident in the works on this recording’.