Beethoven Piano Concerto

In 2010 Yevgeny Sudbin released the first instalment in a cycle of Beethoven's piano concertos. Featuring the Fourth and the Fifth concerto the disc received top marks on web sites such as ClassicsToday.com and klassik-heute.de and was selected CD of the Week in Daily Telegraph and Editor's Choice in Gramophone, whose reviewer wrote 'The mother-of-pearl sheen of [Sudbin's] pianism is backed by a special underlying sensitivity…Delectably light-fingered brilliance and virtuosity shines a new light on some of the most familiar scores in the repertoire…'

The security of Arrau's technique, the continuing fullness of tone and the fine gradations of touch, is nothing less than astonishing. So too is the mature accommodation he has come to with Beethoven's endlessly problematic C minor Concerto. Arrau's earliest recording of the concerto, with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1947, may have been more brilliant (though, from the orchestra's point of view, more slapdash) but this long-pondered, lovingly evolved reading takes us much closer to the idealizing centre of Beethoven's visionary world; and does so, incidentally, in a way that could not be approached in 1000 years by the authenticity merchants with their pygmy instruments and tedious lists of contemporary metronome markings.

After several challenging years, marked by the pandemic and a harsh political climate, we fortunately have musical treasures we can unearth. This is precisely what the Norwegian Wind Ensemble has done. This spring, they present two masterful pieces of music that deserve the full attention of an interested listener.

In 2015, pianist Jonathan Biss initiated the Beethoven/5 commissioning project with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and more than fifteen other orchestras, resulting in a groundbreaking collaboration over nine years. The project yielded five extraordinary new piano works by some of today's most significant composers, responding to Beethoven's own concerti. Volume Two sees "City Stanzas," written by British composer Sally Beamish to pair with Beethoven's first piano concerto, marking a thematic departure from Beamish's earlier works often inspired by nature.