Recorded over 13 years between 1975 and 1988, Murray Perahia's cycle of the complete piano concertos of Mozart, including the concert rondos and double concertos, remains perhaps the most enduring monument to his art. What is it about Perahia's art, some skeptics might ask, that is worth enduring? For one thing, as this 12-disc set amply demonstrates, there is his incredible tone.
Listen to the music first! Perahia's booklet essay is a dry musicological treatise concerned with technical aspects of Bach's music. His performance, on the other hand, is filled with life and excitement. The kind of overt virtuosity heard in some of these variations has been a rarity in Perahia's recordings, but it shows how wide a range he intends to cover in his playing of this masterpiece. Unlike Glenn Gould, who is most listeners' touchstone for piano performances of the Goldbergs, Perahia takes Bach's necessary repeats and uses them as occasions for adventure, varying not only the emphases, but also the actual notes.
This Chopin recital represents Murray Perahia's return to the Sony studios after a two-year absence due to serious injury. So may I start by saying that this is surely the greatest, certainly the richest, of all his many and exemplary recordings. Once again his performances are graced with rare and classic attributes and now, to supreme clarity, tonal elegance and musical perspective, he adds an even stronger poetic profile, a surer sense of the inflammatory rhetoric underpinning Chopin's surface equilibrium. In other words the vividness and immediacy are as remarkable as the finesse. And here, arguably, is the oblique but telling influence of Horowitz who Perahia befriended during the last months of the old wizard's life.
Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia should have recorded all of Mozart's piano music for four hands, which includes several neglected masterpieces. This disc reflects their ideal partnership, two artists of great sensitivity collaborating in performances that feature constant interplay of parts, alertness to each other's work, and superb playing as individuals. The Concerto for Two Pianos ripples along without a care in the world, just as it should, and the English Chamber Orchestra doesn't seem to care that nobody is conducting it. The pieces without orchestra are a bit less significant (as is the Concerto for Three Pianos), but the playing is so beautiful you won't care.
This disc received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Awards for "Record of the Year" and "Best Instrumental Solo or Chamber Performance - 17th/18th Centuries." It also received the 1997 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Instrumental Recording," was Gramophone's "Recording of the Month" for May 1997, and was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra)."
Few pianists in our lifetime demonstrate the kind of depth and musicality Perahia has done in the last 3 decades. His virtuosity and expressiveness are 'classical' in every sense - reserved and stylistically sophisticated. The Grieg Concerto is just superb and this recording shows Perahia's more passionate side of his personality. Highly recommended.
These three piano concertos are constructed from sonatas by J C Bach. Mozart's poetic lightness of touch he later developed to a very high standard as yet to materialize. Yet they are delightful pieces without the emotion and drama of concertos to come. The disc also features Johann Samuel Schrother's piano concerto in C major, Op. 3 no. 3 a contempary of Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the concerto's cadenzas.
Soloist-conducted piano concertos can sometimes mean compromise, even chaos…but not in this case. Indeed, the playing of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Murray Perahia is even sprightlier than on a rival EMI recording of the same repertoire where Sir Neville Marriner conducts and Andrei Gavrilov plays the keyboard part. As soloist, Perahia is his usual stylish, discreet and pianistically refined self. He takes the D minor Concerto’s opening at a fair lick, a hot-foot sprinter embellishing the line with taste and affecting a little ritardando at 3'21 (just as the mood momentarily brightens) a la Edwin Fischer.
Perahia’s immaculate technique, stylistic surety, and classical symmetry are remarkably consistent. While his tone is always singing and rounded, lyrical melodies and decorative passages alike convey a slight diamond-like edge to the peak of crescendos or an emphatic accent. This helps achieve an attractive fusion of unruffled poise and dramatic tension. You hear this quite readily in the B-flat K. 456 concerto ‘s first movement, or in the carefully pedaled trills and restatement of the main theme in K. 595’s heavenly Larghetto, also sampled here. Perahia’s symbiotic musical rapport with Radu Lupu in the two-piano concerto and the two-piano version of the concerto for three pianos should not go unmentioned.– Jed Distler
…[O]utstanding…with Perahia's playing wonderfully refreshing in the Andante and a superb response from the four wind soloists… Clearly all the players are enjoying this rewarding music.