Performer
b. 1941. Turkish pianist.
Turkish pianist known for vast solo recordings and complete cycles; released extensively on her own Idil Biret Archive label. Repertoire spans Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Saint-Saëns.
CD · 4 discs
Idil Biret’s chamber music performances are relatively rare. Most importantly, she played Beethoven’s violin Sonatas Nos. 5, 7 and 9 with Yehudi Menuhin at the Istanbul Festival in July 1973. In 1975, she played all the five Beethoven cello sonatas with Maurice Gendron. With the London String Quartet, in 1980, Biret played the Schumann and Brahms Piano Quintets at the Queen Elisabeth Hall in London, later at the Istanbul Festival and then recorded the Brahms Quintet as well as the Mahler Piano Quartet with the LSQ. In 2011, she played in concerts and recorded Berlioz’s Harold in Italy in Liszt’s piano transcription and Brahms’ 2nd Viola Sonata with Rusen Gu¨nes. In 2014, she played in concerts and recorded the Schumann Piano Quintet with the Borusan Quartet of Turkey. The same year, she recorded the two cello sonatas of Brahms with Roderic von Bennigsen. Finally, in 2019, Biret played and recorded Mendelssohn’s 1st Piano Trio and the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio with Irina Nikotina and Julya Krepak. These are some of the memorable chamber music performances of her career.
CD
In November 1949, at the age of eight, Idil Biret entered the studios of ORTF (Radiodiffusion Television Francaise) in Paris and made her first recordings; these were works by Couperin, Bach, Beethoven and Debussy. In the following decades she made nearly 100 LPs and CDs, released on ten record labels (Pretoria, Vega, Decca, Atlantic/Finnadar, Pantheon, EMI, Naxos, Marco Polo, Alpha, BMP) and many recordings for radio and television stations around the world. These included the complete piano works of Brahms, Chopin and Rachmaninov as well as the Sonatas of Boulez and the Etudes of Ligeti. The Idil Biret Archive (IBA) is now bringing together her past and present recording; as the copyrights are obtained, old recordings no longer available commercially are being released together with her new recordings. The current album features showcases her interpretations of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Glazunov’s Piano Sonata No. 2, recorded in March 2017, and Balakirev’s Islamey “Oriental Fantasy,” recorded in concert at the Lille Festival 1993.
CD · 14 discs
CD · 3 discs
CD · 1 disc
CD · 20 discs
CD · 10 discs
CD · 6 discs
“The Turkish pianist Idil Biret celebrated her 75th birthday in November 2016. To approach and honor this milestone, her own label (IBA), distributed by the now-venerable Naxos, has been releasing a series of comprehensive sets traversing her entire career. The word “comprehensive” is not used lightly; in this set alone, the ninth in the series, we hear performances from her earliest radio broadcasts in 1949 to July of 2016, allowing Biret’s changing approaches to these composers’ works full documentation and exploration; it’s quite a journey, and I have heard no other pianist that has made the complex but still intuitively simple interpretive decisions Biret has made. With these enduring compositions as multisided sculptures to be reexamined, the set constitutes a voyage through the developing art of a child prodigy. It goes a long way toward answering questions about where the preternaturally gifted interpreter goes when convention and career opportunity become subservient to artistic pursuit. May it be an example to those embarking on a similar journey.” (Prof. Marc Medwin)
CD + DVD · 13 discs
CD · 12 discs
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![Idil Biret: LP Originals Edition 1959-1986 [14-CD Set]](http://arkivmusic.com/cdn/shop/files/2309586.jpg?v=1786748969&width=400)
