Serkin Beethoven Piano Concertos

Over 175 hours of music, featuring recordings by over 250 of the greatest Beethoven performers, ranging from Karl Böhm to Alfred Brendel, Claudio Arrau to the Amadeus Quartet, Wilhelm Furtwängler to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Emil Gilels to John Eliot Gardiner, Wilhelm Kempff to Herbert von Karajan, Yehudi Menuhin to Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Murray Perahia to Maurizio Pollini. Includes more than two hours of newly recorded music including several world premieres with Lang Lang, Daniel Hope and Tobias Koch. Over 30 discs of alternative recordings including historic performances and period instrument recordings. Limited & Numbered Edition.

Martha Argerich has made such a rousing specialty of the Schumann Cto. that it's hard to remember a time when another pianist attacked the work with as much passion and spontaneity but here is Rudolf Serkin from 1964 to remind us. Ormandy was at his best as an accompanist, yet he excels himself here with an orchestral part that is vivid and urgent, not what one expects from him. Serkin always favored very close miking of the piano essentially under the lid and we're lucky that this cheap digital remastering isn't hard or glassy; in fact, it has considerable visceral impact while still sounding fairly natural a bit of shallowness is all that I can complain about.

Emil Gilels was renowned for playing Beethoven, like his predecessors Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Backhaus and Rudolf Serkin. He made his name in his native land as promoter of Russian music - that of Rachmaninov, of course (still revered despite his exile in America), Prokofiev, the prodigal son harshly punished on his return to the Soviet Union and Kabalevsky, the epitome of professionalism and popular music. Here you can enjoy a unique triptych, which studiedly sheers away from Svjastoslav Richter’s repertoire.

It is over four years since the Viennese pianist, Till Fellner, winner of the 1993 Clara Haskil Competition in Vevey, signed a contract with Erato, but since then only three major issues have appeared, all highly praised, Beethoven’s Second and Third Concertos (9/95), a solo Schubert disc (4/98) and an unusual coupling of Schumann’s Kreisleriana and the Sonata of the short-lived Julius Reubke (10/96). This Mozart coupling imaginatively brings together what Misha Donat’s excellent note describes as “two concertos in military style”. The only disc listed on the Gramophone Database with this same coupling is from Rudolf Serkin’s late and rather heavy-handed Mozart series with Abbado and the LSO. The crisp, fresh, sparkling playing of Fellner provides a total contrast, and the most relevant comparisons are with Schiff and Perahia (now only available as a 12-disc set).

Here we have all of the solo and concerted stereo Beethoven repertoire featuring Rudolf Serkin released by Sony Classical, gathered together in an 11-disc budget boxed set. It does not include mono Beethoven items that Serkin remade in stereo. However, Serkin's great mono-only Diabelli Variations is present, along with alternative live Marlboro Festival recordings of the Fourth concerto and the Choral Fantasy, plus two stereo versions of the Op. 110 sonata (one from 1971, the other a posthumously released 1960 recording).

This is the first-ever collection of Rudolf Serkin's complete recordings for Columbia Masterworks on 75 discs: Concertos, sonatas, chamber music and vocal performances, all recorded between 1941 and 1985. An all-embracing survey of Rudolf Serkin's recorded achievements, spanning over 44 years. Some collaborations include Adolf Busch, Pablo Casals, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo, Frtiz Reiner, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy, and Arturo Toscanini.

Comprehensive overview of the piano repertoire in classic performances! Super-budget pricing: 50 CDs for less than the price of 6! Includes all the major concertos, sonatas and other solo works. An obvious and quite reasonable question about this set is just how did Decca come to produce this diverse set of recordings involving so many high quality pianists? The most likely way – to simply box 50 previously produced disks – does appear to have been the main method used, but perhaps not always.

For those that prefer to hear these works on piano rather than harpsichord, you can hardly find more enjoyable, illuminating, and elegant performances than these. Andras Schiff has surely become one of the most prominent proponents of J.S. Bach on the piano and its hard to believe these particular discs were ever allowed to slip from commercial availability. Their re-issue here is reason to rejoice. It is with good reason that another chapter in the career of Andras Schiff has started recently with his new series of Beethoven Sonatas on ECM, and of course more Bach. He is a true master, and the Bach Concerto recordings with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, led by Schiff himself, exemplify this and count as essential listening.