Saint Seans Piano Concerto 4 Dvd5

In 2006, Nicholas Angelich released his first disc of Brahms' solo piano music: a coupling of the ballades, the rhapsodies, and the Paganini Variations. He followed that up in 2007 with a two-disc set containing Brahms' four sets of late piano music. Both releases were simply fabulous. Blazingly virtuosic, deeply expressive, and immensely powerful, these were Brahms' performances to treasure.

With Stephen Hough's Mendelssohn we enter a new dimension. The soft, stylish arpeggios that open the first work here, the Capriccio brillant, announce something special. But this is just a preparation for the First Concerto. Here again, 'stylish' is the word. One can sense the background – especially the operatic background against which these works were composed. The first solo doesn't simply storm away, fortissimo; one hears distinct emotional traits: the imperious, thundering octaves, the agitated semiquavers, the pleading appoggiaturas.

In the era prior to recordings, the only way for an audience unable to organize a symphonic performance to get to know a large work was to perform it, or hear it performed, in a chamber or keyboard arrangement. Recordings of arrangements from the nineteenth century have appeared in a steady stream, and while they're no substitute for the real thing, it's interesting to observe the artistry of the individual arrangers.

History of the Piano Concerto in D minor by Johannes Brahms: how the composer initially planned a sonata for two pianos and then a symphony; how Beethoven's overwhelming legacy inhibited him; how the young composer also as a pianist ended up delighting his audiences in Hanover but unsettling them in Leipzig. Dina Ugorskaja, performing with the Brandenburg Symphony under the conductor and Siemens Prize recipient Peter Gülke, is now presenting this work in its essence: a magnificent contribution to the music literature that even 160 years after its premiere continues to be filled with enigmas and marvels.

From the time I first heard Ludwig Thuille's masterly Sextet for Piano and Winds in B-flat Major, Op. 6, thirty years ago, I have wanted to hear more music by this sadly neglected composer, a more traditionalist friend of Richard Strauss. Apart from a meager handful of recordings (quickly out of print) of the Sextet, though, for years nothing else was available. I read that Thuille, apart from large vocal works, and a good deal of chamber music, had written one symphony, the Symphony in F, and at least one piano concerto, and have been watching eagerly over the years, hoping that someone would finally commit them to disc. And at last!

This disc confirms Nicholas Angelich's reputation as the greatest Brahms player of his generation. The pianist's previous recordings of music by the great German Romantic, collections of solo piano music, chamber music, and the First Piano Concerto, were all magnificent, and this recording of the Second Piano Concerto with Paavo Järvi leading the Frankfurt Radio Symphony plus the Klavierstücke, Op. 76, is at the same level.

Howard Hanson is one of America's great mid-century composers. His music, like that of Roy Harris, draws its character from the plains, from the pioneer blood that settled that part of the country. Here we have two major symphonies, a piano concerto, and a tone-poem, "Mosaics". These works are at the heart of American Romanticism; his melodies are distinct and tonal, his writing formal.

Maurizio Pollini's 2011 concert recording of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor is an important document because it not only captures his return to playing with the esteemed Staatskapelle Dresden (his first performance with the group since 1986), and his first collaboration with conductor Christian Thielemann, but it presents the very work the pianist played at his Staatskapelle debut in 1976. All of this background is helpful to know, to understand the significance Deutsche Grammophon attaches to this release, even at the risk of offering a CD that runs just over 45 minutes, without any filler for added value.

“Intensely musical performances of works that are so often treated as mere showpieces. It is pleasant to renew acquaintance with this under-rated pianist, whose command of the virtuoso elements in these works is second to none, but whose inherent musicianship reveals aspects that superficial pianists overlook. Excellent orchestral support and fine recording ensure a strong recommendation”

Mitsuko Uchida has been a committed exponent of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto for over a decade now. It is a work which remains controversial in its adaptation of the serial method to an almost Brahmsian harmonic palette, wedded to a formal approach that takes up the integrated design, and textural richness, of Schoenberg's pre-atonal works. Certainly in terms of the balance between soloist and orchestra, this recording clarifies the often capricious interplay to a degree previously unheard on disc (and most likely in the concert hall too).Interpretatively, it combines Pollini's dynamism, without the hectoring touch that creeps into the Adagio's climactic passages, and Brendel's lucidity, avoiding the deadpan feeling that pervades his final Giocoso.