Philips Protech Dst

Founded 60 years ago by Menahem Pressler, Daniel Guilet and Bernard Greenhouse, the Beaux Arts Trio performed and recorded exclusively for Philips Classics until 1995. Celebrated for their outstanding chamber-music qualities, the Beaux Arts are one of the greatest ensembles in the history of recorded music. This special 60CD box set includes their extensive discography on Philips Classics and encompasses almost the entire piano trio literature.

Clearly Philips is not trying to sell this disc because of the works being performed – a fairly miscellaneous collection of Bach's works written or transcribed for the harpsichord – but rather for the performer of the works. But since the performer is Gustav Leonhardt – perhaps the greatest musician of the whole early music movement of the second half of the twentieth century – that is a more than sufficient reason to get this disc.

Limited Edition 80-CD set presenting Claudio Arrau’s complete Philips and American Decca recordings plus his live recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 with Leonard Bernstein (Amnesty International) on Deutsche Grammophon. Balancing invincible technical accuracy and virtuosity with rigorous intellectual and spiritual stimulation, Claudio Arrau played to probe, divine and to interpret the will of the composer, always faithful to the text. He viewed technique and virtuosity as inseparable from musical expression and constantly stressed the expressive, spiritual and creative power of virtuosity while downplaying its sensational aspect and suffusing every note with meaning.

The Beaux Arts, late 1980s-style, is recognizably the same creature as it was at the start of the decade, or even two decades ago. The fingers of Menahem Pressler still twinkle away, the violin and cello exchange angst for mischief in volatile and ebullient alternation. The most obvious comparison for their latest release is the identical Dvorak/Mendelssohn coupling of 1980 on Pearl. Then Daniel Guilet was the violinist, and his comparatively small voice and old-style sweetness make their mark: this Dvorak is a small-scale, kid-glove performance, with the gentle acoustic recessing the violin even further and softening the high-spirited Dumka episodes.

Limited Edition 80-CD set presenting Claudio Arrau’s complete Philips and American Decca recordings plus his live recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 with Leonard Bernstein (Amnesty International) on Deutsche Grammophon. Balancing invincible technical accuracy and virtuosity with rigorous intellectual and spiritual stimulation, Claudio Arrau played to probe, divine and to interpret the will of the composer, always faithful to the text. He viewed technique and virtuosity as inseparable from musical expression and constantly stressed the expressive, spiritual and creative power of virtuosity while downplaying its sensational aspect and suffusing every note with meaning.

Joe Zawinul - Stories of the Danube (1996) {Philips 454 143-2}
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© 1996 Philips | 454 143-2
Classical / Jazz/ World Jazz

Billed as Joe Zawinul's First Symphony, this large-scale classical work may seem like a radical departure to the composer/keyboardist's jazz and pop fans, but it is really a logical expression of Zawinul's indestructible European roots. Moreover, it is not as alien to his jazz work as one might suppose; at times, one can hear trademark Zawinul ostinato lines in fleshed-out, orchestrated form, and rhythms and tunes of his jazz-rock days ("Doctor Honoris Causa," "Pharoah's Dance" "Unknown Soldier") turn up like old friends crashing a black-tie ceremony.

John Lewis - The Bridge Game, Vol 2 (1986) {Philips 825 698-2}
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© 1986 Philips / Nippon Phonogram | 825 698-2
Classical / Jazz / Third Stream / Baroque / Piano

… hear Bach performed on modern piano – if you are one of those calcified troglodytes who proclaims that you 'don't like the sound of the harpsichord' – then you might consider this recording of the Preludes and Fugues by John Lewis, the classically-trained pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It has the virtue of integrity; that is, it treats the piano as a piano, and not a harpsichord wannabe. Bach's compositions do NOT employ the full resources of the modern grand piano, for the obvious reason that those resources were not available on even a double-manual harpsichord. But the harpsichord had resources that the modern piano has lost.

Kohsuke Mine - First (1970) {2021 Philips–BBE Music FX-8508} (with Masabumi Kikuchi)
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© 1970, 2021 Philips / BBE Music | FX-8508
Jazz / Modal Music / Post Bop / Saxophone

BBE Music present the latest in the acclaimed J Jazz Masterclass Series: Kohsuke Mine ‘First’, the debut album by one of the leading artists in the new wave of modern jazz that swept Japan in the late 60s and early 70s. ‘First’ epitomises the shifting sound of the Japanese modern jazz scene of the time, characterised by rich textures and tones, kinetic rhythms, punctuated by urgent, angular melody lines.

Brendel has now recorded the work three times for the gramophone. At first, on Vox/Turnabout in the early 1960s, he was the brilliant iconoclast before his deeper realization of the work's essentially comic energies. And here I use 'comic' both in the narrow sense of the term (the Diabe/li is, after all, full ofjokes, many of them with the staying-power of the finest Wildean epigrams) and in the broader sense: what Susanne Langer has called, comedy "as an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence".