Making Music at The Piano

With this recital Shai Wosner declares himself a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character. Entirely modern in style (tonally lean and sharply focused, never given to easy or sentimental options), he relishes every twist and turn in the so-called Reliquie Sonata, with its quasi-orchestral, defiantly unpianistic first movement and its astonishing second movement modulations (Alkan himself never wrote anything more boldly experimental). Unlike Richter in his monolithic recording, Wosner opts for the two completed movements rather than allowing the music to evaporate into thin air, displaying throughout a finely concentrated sense of music that achieves its vision and depth through extreme austerity.

Brahms (1833-97) devoted much of the 1880s to his three Piano Trios, having decided, as he told a friend, that there was “no further point in attempting an opera or a marriage”. They are among his less familiar chamber works. He originally wrote No 1 as a young man, overhauling it more than three decades later in 1889. All three works – the B major Op 8, C major Op 87 and C minor Op 101 – have a tender, shadowy intensity, without quite the same heart-on-sleeve fervour of the bigger chamber works. The string players here – brother and sister Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff – are regular quartet partners. Together with sensitive pianism from Lars Vogt, ensemble is alert, accurate, never forced: already a favourite CD.

This remarkable set, culled from the archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the early years in which Glenn Gould emerged as a major classical pianist (1951–55), packages together five discs previously issued singly between 1994 and 1999. The only new CD in the collection is the second Bach disc, which features typically scintillating performances of the Partita No. 5, Three-Part Inventions, Italian Concerto , and the Concerto in D Minor. Of the various discs here, the only one to contain works not issued commercially by Columbia-CBS-Sony is the second Beethoven CD (originally released in 1997 as CBC 2013).

That the cello's repertoire has been so wonderfully enriched during the 20th century is due largely to Mstislav Rostropovich, the most influential cellist of his time, a champion of liberty, and also a noted conductor and pianist. Born In Baku on 27 March 1927 to a pianist mother and a cello-playing father who had studied with Pablo Casals, 'Slava' received early paternal grounding in his chosen instrument.