Berliner

Here are Maurizio Pollini's compelling interpretations — paired with two now legendary conductors - of five piano masterworks performed with the Vienna Philharmonic at home, the Musikverein's magnificent "golden hall" In Mozart and Beethoven the camera captures the pianist's virtuosity as well as his empathy with Karl Bohm as they document the only two Mozart concertos that Pollini has ever released. For the Brahms concerto Pollini is joined by a young Claudio Abbado creating great music-making in which this essential repertoire is joyfully illuminated by two kindred spirits.

Michael Rische belongs to the small group of musicians, even internationally, who consistently enrich musical life with authoritative discoveries. After Michael Rische presented a recording of compositions on the notes b-a-c-h by Johann Sebastian Bach up to the present in the Bach Year 2000, he is working with growing success to re-establish the almost forgotten piano concertos of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel in musical life. With his recordings to date, he has received extensive international attention right from the start. Leipzig 1733: a significant date for a musical genre that has been an integral part of our musical life for more than two hundred years - the piano concerto. In this year Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his great Concerto in D minor BWV 1052 and his second eldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel, at the age of 19, his first piano concerto, the Concerto Wq 1 in A minor. If one listens to the concertos in direct comparison, one hardly wants to believe that both were composed at the same time and in the same place. The Concerto in D major Wq 45 was written in Hamburg in 1778, with two horns added to the orchestral sound. Of all his piano concertos, the Concerto in E minor Wq 15 (1745) is by far the most experimental.

Liszt’s Dante Symphony is a work of astonishing imagination. His evocation of the ‘Inferno’, the shade of Francesca da Rimini and her sad remembered love is marked by strokes of genius which, with bewildering frequency, pre-empt the mature Wagner (who was, incidentally, the dedicatee of the work). If the second and third movements – the ‘Paradiso’ was wisely commuted to a setting of part of the Magnificat plus a brief Hosanna – don’t quite match the sweep and control of the first, they have their own particular magic. Even so, the work has not acquired the popularity of the Faust Symphony. Barenboim’s new recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is thus particularly welcome. Not only does it augment the number of available recordings to four, it is also the most polished. Even performing ‘live’, the Berlin Philharmonic turns in a performance of near-perfection – the solo lines are a particular joy.

Between 1961 and 1986, Herbert von Karajan made three recordings of the Mozart Requiem for Deutsche Grammophon, with little change in his conception of the piece over the years. This recording, from 1975, is, on balance, the best of them. The approach is Romantic, broad, and sustained, marked by a thoroughly homogenized blend of chorus and orchestra, a remarkable richness of tone, striking power, and an almost marmoreal polish. Karajan viewed the Requiem as idealized church music rather than a confessional statement awash in operatic expressiveness. In this account, the orchestra is paramount, followed in importance by the chorus, then the soloists. Not surprisingly, the singing of the solo quartet sounds somewhat reined-in, especially considering these singers' pedigrees. By contrast, the Vienna Singverein, always Karajan's favorite chorus, sings with a huge dynamic range and great intensity, though with an emotional detachment nonetheless. Perfection, if not passion or poignancy, is the watchword. The Berlin orchestra plays majestically, and the sound is pleasingly vivid.

Sir Simon Rattle was in no doubt: the performance of the St. Matthew Passion which he realized together with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Rundfunkchor Berlin in 2010 was for him “the single most important thing we ever did here.” Critics around the world agreed. They praised the semi-staged “ritualization” by American star-director Peter Sellars, as well as the outstanding musical performances by the soloists, including Magdalena Kozená, Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, and Mark Padmore as the Evangelist.

As before with the St. Matthew Passion, star director Peter Sellars succeeded in creating a staging which made the spiritual and dramatic content of the Passion story even more intensive. The New York Times also praised the “brilliant and energetic” playing of the orchestra, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the “haunting, almost unsurpassable singing of all those involved.”

The surprising thing about these three discs is that the performances get better the further we depart from the shores of Romanticism and tonality. Not what you'd expect from von K and the Berliners. Pelleas benefits from wonderfully lush orchestral playing from the Berlin Philharmonic, but it feels more like very colourful scene painting rather than real drama. To get to the Romantic heart of this piece, try Barbirolli: for its expressionist, forward looking (via Verklarte Nacht to Erwartung) side, go to Boulez.

Gilels had immense physical power and impeccable control, but he was also capable of exquisitely refined poetry and had an acute perception of the lyrical impulse lying behind even the most assertive of Brahms's writing. The firmness of attack and the depth of sound that make his (and the Berlin Philharmonic's) playing so thrillingly dynamic can be offset by the most poignant of delicate gestures. There is undeniable grandeur to these readings, but with those additional qualities of wise thinking, generous expression and artistry of great subtlety, these performances are in a class of their own.