Following the 5-album box set of Claudio Arrau's solo recitals, this new installment focuses on his SWR recordings of piano concertos. The recorded works belong to Arrau’s most favorites and are now being released for the first time. These are stirring interpretations full of controlled virtuosity. Claudio Arrau León was a Chilean pianist known for his interpretations of a vast repertoire spanning the baroque to 20th-century composers, especially Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. A child prodigy, he could read music before he could read words. “His sound is amazing, and it is entirely his own… no one else has it exactly that way. His devotion… is extraordinary. He ennobles that music in a way no one else in the world can.” (Sir Colin Davis)

He has now been composing for nearly half a century, Wolfgang Rihm, born in Karlsruhe in 1952, where he was already learning composition from Eugen Werner Velte while still a high school student, later also from Klaus Huber in Freiburg and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, belonged to the so-called "young savages" at the famous Donaueschingen Festival for contemporary music back in the 1970s. Two Other Movements is a composition commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra that premiered under the baton of Lorin Maazel in New York in March 2005. The title is intended to signify that every new work is, as it were, a commentary on the one preceding it; the "two other movements" therefore make up the continuation of those completed beforehand. Abkehr, whose premiere was performed by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie conducted by Gary Bertini in Zurich on April 4, 1986, was written as a supplement to a rendition of the Ninth Symphony by Gustav Mahler.

The Mozart symphonies on this album were recorded within two weeks at the European Music Festival Stuttgart in September 2006. More than 20 symphonies, ranging from the earliest to the last ten, were chosen to represent the superb range of the composer's output. The aim was to recreate as far as possible the playing style of the period. Roger Norrington used the exact orchestra size of each symphony at it's first performance (the smallest was a mere 18 players!). Tempos followed the most recent research. Bow strokes, articulation and phrasing were carefully studied, and of course the orchestra played quite without the 20th century vibrato. Every album in this edition contains a symphony from the early, the middle and the late period. The last four symphonies, however, were played in a much grander, and experimental, manner (24 violins and 16 woodwinds).