For many decades the orchestras of the German broadcasting service SWR have worked together with many famous musicians from all over the world, including the outstanding pianists selected for this collection, among them Clara Haskil, Jörg Demus, Paul Badura-Skoda, Alicia de Larrocha, Wilhelm Backhaus, and Géza Anda. Furthermore, Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (1903–1991) is regarded as one of the supreme keyboard masters of the 20th century and must feature in any comparative survey of performances of the central repertoire from Beethoven to Brahms. Annie Fischer (1914–1995), a pupil of Ernst von Dohnányi later went on to make some legendary recordings with Otto Klemperer. Friedrich Gulda (1930–2000) polarized the music scene by embracing the parallel worlds of classical music and jazz in equal measure. He was not only one of the most brilliant pianists of the 20th century with regard to tone and technique, but also one of the wittiest and most musically competent. For decades Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991) was seen as the leading interpreter of German music from Beethoven and Schubert through Schumann and Liszt to Brahms.
Sometimes you come to appreciate some of the conducting legends of the past when you have first listened to one of the conducting duds of the present, and that was my experience with this Mahler Third. I had just suffered (yes, I believe that is the precise word) through Carla Delfrate butchering the music of French opera composers when I put on this Mahler Third. The difference in musical intelligence, feeling, phrasing, rhythmic lift, and correctly judged tempos was like escaping the River Styx and being elevated to Valhalla.
Yet even without such a quantum leap in conducting quality, one cannot escape the feeling that this Mahler Third was indeed one of the great, even momentous, concerts of the 20th century. Shockingly for such a late date, this was its first professional performance in England, and those familiar with Horenstein’s work will know that the British were extremely lucky to have him for this concert. Just about the only negative thing one can note about this recording is the somewhat dry mono sound—good for a 1961 broadcast (indeed, better than Horenstein’s equally legendary Mahler Eighth) but still restricted in sonics. But heavens, what a performance! I actually think that Horenstein’s performance of the first movement even outstrips that of Georg Solti, which up until now was my all-time favorite reading of it, largely due to the more finely detailed layering of the instrumental texture. Despite the boxiness, you hear everything, and every instrument or instrumental group seems to have something important to add to the overall “story” of the music. Nor was I alone in my reaction: At the end of the movement, the London audience does something highly uncharacteristic for the British at an orchestral concert: they roundly applaud the first movement. It’s quite an achievement, and it seems almost incredible that this is its first-ever commercial release.
Moreover, unlike Solti (and even unlike his Nonesuch studio recording of this Symphony with the same orchestra), Horenstein’s intensity and musical drive never slacken in this performance, not even for a millisecond. Seldom have I heard the second movement played so exquisitely, the strings singing sweetly and the rhythmic underpinning simply astonishing. Many years ago, before I began reviewing, I bought, heard, and was disappointed by James Levine’s Mahler Third recording, and I was only slightly more impressed by a live performance he gave with Jessye Norman as the mezzo soloist in Carnegie Hall. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it, but this Horenstein performance has everything right about it that Levine simply got wrong. Perhaps too much “devotion,” too much psychoanalyzing Mahler at the time he wrote it, and too little of just digging into the score and translating it into sound? It’s hard to say at the remove of 40 years, but let’s just say that Horenstein has the full measure of this Symphony while Levine only had a fair idea of it.
Now, one should be aware that Horenstein’s view of the score is not always 100 percent what Mahler wrote. He sometimes ignores tempo changes and gives his own spin on the music, but to my ears everything he does in this performance works well. Not to keep beating the same drum, but that first movement is an excellent example. In the studio recording, it went along at an almost dirge-like pace; here, it is utterly dynamic and thrilling. In both the studio and live versions, the posthorn solo is beautifully played by Dennis Egan, and this is one moment in this broadcast where the sonics are good enough to give the listener a fine sense of “space.” Helen Watts’s singing is rich and beautiful, although not quite as expressive in detail as Janet Baker with Michael Tilson Thomas (Sony-CBS) or Ewa Podle? with Antoni Wit (Naxos), my other two favorite Mahler Thirds. The Highgate School Choir is superb, having that sound that one somehow instinctively associates with British children’s choirs. Horenstein’s tempo in the last movement is brisk when compared to other Mahlerians (21:13 compared to Tilson Thomas’s 26:13 or Wit’s 25:31), which some listeners may interpret as a race to the finish on Horenstein’s part, but just listen to the feeling he elicits from the LSO; and, at this clip, the movement lacks its usual “draggy” feeling, as if it were an interminable exercise in bathos. Now, of course, it can and does also work well at the slower tempos that Tilson Thomas and Wit use, but that is the magic of Mahler. His symphonies, unlike almost any others I can think of, can withstand nearly any and every tempo change one can put into them. The only thing they cannot withstand is a boring reading, and boring is not a word one can apply to this performance.
As a bonus (since the entire Third Symphony clocks in at a few seconds under 90 minutes) we age given an equally spectacular reading of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Claudio Arrau as soloist. My readers know that I like but do not really love Arrau as a pianist; everything he played was good and usually had the right style, but many of his performances and recordings are no better than those of several other pianists. Here, however, he truly sounds caught up in the moment, not least due to Horenstein’s exquisite shaping and phrasing of the music. Although I still love Fritz Reiner’s dynamic 1954 account with Rubinstein and Max Fiedler’s old-world and slightly eccentric (but still musical) performance from the early 1930s (with Alfred Hoehn as soloist), there is just something so shapely and well-phrased about Horenstein’s reading of the orchestral part that it grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Arrau takes a while to heat up—his entrance is played very well but not with any particular abandon, but then just listen to the way he responds with both remarkable fire and stunning nuance to the equally nuanced playing of the French Radio and TV Orchestra. The best way to describe this performance, overall, is as an alternation of a singing line with ebb and flow against the dramatic outbursts, the latter never dull but also never so explosive that they ruin the line of the music. Oh, there are many of those among our young conductors today who could learn a thing or three from Horenstein about phrasing! True, the strings in the last movement sound a little scrappy, but no matter. The musical treatment and intensity of this performance trumps technical polish.
Archipel provides absolutely no liner notes with this release, not even a sentence or two to tell prospective buyers who Jascha Horenstein was. Even though I know that a recording like this is aimed at the collectors’ market, that very few people will bother with a 53-year-old mono recording of the Mahler Third when they can get digital stereo from Tilson Thomas, Wit, or the late Claudio Abbado (another outstanding version), but I still feel that the label owes it to those few who are under age 30 and buy this release to let them know who Horenstein was and explain his importance. Otherwise, I recommend this set highly.
Brahms, Schumann & Beethoven: Piano Concertos / Arrau
SWR
CD · 3 discs
$26.99Oct 18, 2019
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)
Claudio Arrau Plays Beethoven, Schumann & Liszt (Live)
IDIS
CD · 1 disc
$8.49$16.99Save 50%May 12, 2015
The great piano virtuoso Claudio Arrau (1903-91) joined a transcendental technique with the gift of intellectual analysis, making him a superb Liszt performer as well as one of the most admired 20th c. performers of classical and romantic repertoire. "His" Beethoven had no comparison for clarity of musical logic. Arrau's Schumann perfectly joined strong passionate intensity with a sense of rigor regarding musical structure. All these elements are present on this CD that gathers two live Swiss recitals, captured by Italian Swiss Radio, from 1959 and 1963 during the apex of his career.
There have been few pianists of Arrau's range and stature, and these invaluable live recordings can only reaffirm memories of another time, another place, where sheer musical calibre and quality counted above all. Audio restoration: Lani Spahr; Notes: Bryce Morrison. All previously unissued; released by permission of the Arrau Estate. TT: 3 hrs 39 min 14 sec. UPC # 0-17685 1263-1 (3CDs)
BUZZ: There was a time--specifically, the middle years of the 20th century--when the music in this recital used commonly to be played in a somewhat prettified, Dresden-china fashion. Nothing could be more different than Claudio Arrau's approach to Mozart even in the relatively early stages of his career (and he was sixty-one when these live performances were given). Certainly, some other pianists in those days gave full value to the dramatic power of the minor-key sonatas, K. 310 and K. 457, though very few approached the sheer volcanic force he brought to those bass octaves in the A-minor's finale. But you encounter Arrau's no-holds-barred style even in seemingly less serious works: the finale of K. 283, for example, already sounds, under his hands, more unpredictably Beethovenish than in the interpretations of some of his contemporaries; and in the relatively relaxed finale of K. 570, he punches out the insistent staccato repeated notes of the contrasting central episode with positively demonic relish. This, then, is in an important sense "bigger" Mozart playing than was the norm 50 years ago. At the same time, the clarity of Arrau's texture and the often airy lightness of his pedaling keeps his view of the music from transgressing 18th-century stylistic norms. And while his reputation is based to a degree on his notably classical restraint, you will find in these performances any number of moments when the wit of his timing creates a delightfully mischievous effect. Baldwin piano. Restoration engineer: Gene Gaudette. Premiere CD release! Issued with the kind permission of the Arrau Estate. AAD stereo Total Time:100 min.
The Lost Recordings has rediscovered the master tapes of this double recital in the archives of Berlin Radio. The label thus offers, as a world premiere, this Beethoven recital by the great Claudio Arrau, recorded on March 12, 1959 at the Hochschule für Muzik in Berlin, totally unpublished, delivering a breathtaking reading of the Farewells, the Appassionata and the Sonata Op. 110. An exceptional document. When Claudio Arrau took the stage of the prestigious Hochschule für Musik in Berlin on 12 March 1959, he was, at 56, an artist at the very peak of his fame and the pinnacle of hispianistic and intellectual powers. Rarely in pieces other than these solo works for piano, where sentimental confession, mystical revery and the constant concern for form are inextricably entwined, did Beethoven so clearly create a dramatic sound setting to depict common mortals grappling with their confused feelings, doubts and existential contemplation.
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos 3, 32 & 23 "appassionata"
ICA Classics
CD · 1 disc
$14.99Apr 29, 2014
"Some consider Arrau’s live Beethoven sonata performances superior to the studio versions. In the later sonatas, Arrau himself alluded to the fact that an improvisatory approach was required which was difficult to achieve within a recording studio.
Of op. 111, Jonathan Summers says in his booklet
note that ‘as we near the close...we realise we've been transported to another world by Arrau’.
This 1960 Stockholm recording, with Arrau at his career peak, is extremely rare and has never been issued."
Recorded at the Salzburg Festival in 1982 when he was already 80, this epic recital (Beethoven’s Op 81a Sonata is omitted for reasons of length) comes as a reminder of Claudio Arrau’s unique stature. His grandeur is overwhelming, his rich saturated tone unmistakable. True, expressive points may be stretched to their limit, yet even if you feel that the intensity with which he endows even the simplest phrase is over-bearing, his daunting mastery is never in doubt. Here, surely, is the final fruit of years of blazing commitment to his art and to two composers central to his vast and encompassing repertoire.
Fortunately the time is long past when Beethoven and Liszt might have been considered strange bed-fellows (the one profound, the other flashy and meretricious). And in Arrau’s magisterial hands you are made more than aware of the influence of Beethoven on Liszt (‘His work is like the pillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites through the desert’), an inspiration which led to the symphonic weight, breadth and quasi-orchestral sonorities of the the B minor and Dante Sonatas. Certainly when Arrau opens Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata – muffled, distant and alive with menace – you may well look ahead to the sotto voce start to the Liszt Sonata. Again, every part is strenuously rather than elegantly argued (surface elegance played no part in Arrau’s musical make-up) and time and again there is an almost palpable sense of the pianist’s strength and vision, his thunderous and rhetorical close one of many examples of recreation on the grandest, loftiest scale.
Turning to Liszt, Arrau is grandioso indeed at 2'00" in the B minor Sonata and overall his generosity of spirit is such that it makes many recent performances seem sadly constricted in scope by comparison. Similarly in the Dante Sonata, Arrau’s response to a term such as disparato, is of an emotionalism that few would risk today and which he might have regretfully qualified in the recording studio. Seemingly hewn out of rock, these performances form a deeply personal, mesmeric and exhausting experience and are entirely what Peter Cosse, in his heartfelt review for the Salzburger Nachrichten, called ‘The Sum of a Pianist’s Life’.
Chilean virtuoso Claudio Arrau, (1903-1991) was one of the greatest and most recorded pianists of all time. His musical talent was recognized from an early age and he played his first recital at age five. At age eight the Chilean government awarded him a grant for study in Berlin with Waldemar Lutsch and Martin Krause who was a student of Franz Liszt and whose teaching and influence were greatly significant on Arrau. Arrau's adolescent career flourished in Germany - his formal Berlin debut of 1914 was followed by tours of Germany and Scandinavia. He won the Liszt prize for the second time in 1920. The same year he played his Berlin Philharmonic debut with conductor Karl Muck. Also in 1920, he made his London debut. In 1923 and 1924 he came to the United States. In 1926 Arrau returned to the Stern Conservatory in Berlin as a professor of piano, a position which he held until 1940. In 1927 he won the Concours International de Pianists in Geneva. He returned to the USA with a 1941 Carnegie Hall recital receiving rave reviews, which effectively re-launched his American career. DOREMI is pleased to present here Claudio Arrau in two concerts of Chopin and Liszt: two concertos from Copenhagen with the Danish Radio Orchestra (September 1967), and his recital at the Helsinki Festival in September, 1972 which includes Liszt's Sonata in B Minor.
