Maurizio Pollini

This is such a fabulous disc! I cannot hear anything wrong with this analogue recording. Power, freshness, enthusiasm and poetic insight – this endeavour has it all. On one occasion after another, the performers get caught up in the rip-tide of Brahms’ creativity and it’s impossible not to be swept away with them. Pollini has a reputation for being cold – perhaps it’s grounded in those late Beethoven sonatas from the Seventies – but there’s nothing here to justify such a tag: he burns like a Saturn V rocket.

In anticipation of his 75th birthday in 2017, this luxurious 55-CD set presents Pollini's complete recordings on DG with their original covers, including the first ever release of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich (recorded in 1974). Also included are a 200-page booklet and 3 bonus DVDs: concerto recordings with Böhm and Abbado as well as Bruno Monsaingeon's documentary film De main de maître (2015).

It's a very gemutlich interpretation, and if you like to hear the first movement taken by the scruff of the neck and shaken, you won't get it here. There's an underlying melancholy that both Leinsdorf and Berman seem attuned to, and as a result the mood carries into the second movement, which is played with great delicacy, Leinsdorf relishing the almost chamber-music quality of some of the writing. The Chicago winds are splendid here, giving an almost nocturne-like feel to this movement.

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11, is a piano concerto written by Frédéric Chopin in 1830, when he was twenty years old. It was first performed on 12 October of that year, at the Teatr Narodowy (the National Theatre) in Warsaw, Poland, with the composer as soloist, during one of his "farewell" concerts before leaving Poland.