Unison Chords

These six works are Beethoven's last major completed compositions. Extremely complex and largely misunderstood by musicians and audiences of Beethoven's day, the late quartets are now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time and have inspired many later composers.

Alone among Frenchwomen of her era, Louise Farrenc (née Dupont) (1804-1875) achieved real fame as a composer during her lifetime. She was also a brilliant pianist and was the only woman teacher of any instrument at the Paris Conservatoire in the whole of the 19th century. She had come to this rare acclaim as the result of a liberal upbringing amongst a family of noted painters and sculptors living in an enclave of similarly artistic and intellectual families at the Sorbonne. She studied with Reicha from her teens, but her lessons had to be private because women were not allowed to study as regular pupils at the Conservatoire. She wrote three symphonies; Nos. 1 & 3 are contained on an earlier issue from cpo featuring the same artists, the NDR Radiophilharmonie (Hannover) conducted by Johannes Goritzki, also available (and favorably reviewed) here at Amazon. This CD contains the middle symphony and two much earlier overtures, simply called 'No. 1' and 'No. 2.'

Zoltán Kocsis performs the complete solo piano music of his fellow Hungarian, Béla Bartók. Completed in 2001, these critically acclaimed, definitive performances are the benchmark against which all others are considered.

This is quite simply one of the most important and consistently superbly executed recording projects of all time. Bartók's piano music isn't exactly overrepresented on disc, being as it is without doubt one of the most important piano oeuvres ever composed, and in the hand of Zoltán Kocsis, doubtlessly one of the greatest pianists alive today, one should expect some superb discs where the works at long last receive the treatment they deserve. In fact, the actual result surpasses any possible expectations.

Two symphonies from Beethoven's so-called 'Heroic' period—No 4 completed in 1806 and the supremely defiant No 5 begun in the same year and completed two years later.