Turca

Marking 50 years since the passing of Wilhelm Backhaus (5 July 1969) The Complete Decca Recordings brings together, for the first time, the artist’s complete recordings for the label. Wilhelm Backhaus was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century and a superlative Beethoven interpreter. “I try to play Beethoven as I feel it, as I try to imagine the man – not what story he is telling me, but what he is feeling […] I want to make Beethoven alive, whether it is romantic or not. It is modern – I want people to understand that,” he noted. Wilhelm Backhaus – The Complete Decca Recordings, a limited edition 38CD box set, is out now and all of the newly remastered albums are also available digitally.

"The sonatas of Mozart are unique," said Artur Schnabel. "They are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists." It was performances like Mikhail Pletnev's that inspired Schabel's maxim. Pletnev's technique is awe-inspiring, and the smooth, room-sized sound he gets out of a grand piano promise wonderful things as one begins listening to the disc. But there's a certain refusal to fool with the music, a Zen detachment perhaps, that's necessary for a really good Mozart performance, and Pletnev does too much tinkering.

Together in one box all the records for printing the great pianist Ivo Pogorelich, one of the most respected and extraordinary 80 artists of recent decades.

Sonatas 7 - 12, composed between 1777 and about 1783, mark a significant evolution with respect to the preceding ones: Mozart’s expressive world now takes on many new facets, and in Sonata K 310 it reaches dramatic depths of unprecedented intensity and sombreness. In the other sonatas, too, although seemingly “lighter”, we find an infinity of expressive approaches that had never previously appeared with such naturalness and variety of inflections. However, Mozart always succeeds in maintaining an admirable balance between seriousness and facetiousness, between playfulness and drama, with constant originality in his management of form.

This three-disc set of all of the studio recordings of Mozart's piano concertos and sonatas made by German pianist Edwin Fischer between 1933-1947 may elicit different responses from his fans than from listeners not already persuaded of his greatness.

Michael Wessel is a professor for piano playing, song accompaniment and methodology at the University of Protestant Church Music in Bayreuth. He studied piano, composition, music theory and school music in four major courses at the music academies in Detmold and Stuttgart: piano with Hanns-Ulrich Kunze, Jürgen Uhde and Elisabeth Leonskaja, composition with Helmut Lachenmann, music theory and music theory with Martin C. Redel, music pedagogy with Karl Heinrich Ehrenforth. During his studies at Lachenmann, he received a graduate scholarship from the state of Baden-Württemberg. The present release is the fourth volume in his project of recording Mozart's complete piano sonatas.

Valery Afanassiev on “WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART” Today we are too fond of clear-cut solutions and exhaustive explanations. Writers and film directors are supposed to shed light even on those nooks and crannies which should remain dark for the sake of perspective. And readers as well as cinema goers should remain in the dark about this and that for the sake of the same perspective, the same space, the same labyrinth. Alas, there are no more dark ladies either in sonnets or in novels. We have forgotten the aroma of unanswerable questions. And yet every masterpiece is an unanswerable question. And so is every artist of genius. In Pushkin's short tragedy Mozart and Salieri there are many unanswerable questions. Actually it ends with such a question: 'Is an evil deed compatible with genius?' (Gesualdo, who was unquestionably a composer of genius, killed his wife. But does this murder answer the question?)

Schubert: "Wanderer" Fantasy (2019 edition, 1989 edition), Impromptu Op. 90, Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 11, No. 18, Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, Chopin: Piano Sonata No. 3, Others recorded from 1988-2021.