This new release features Pierre Fournier in his first recording of Beethoven's works for cello and piano in 1959 with Friedrich Gulda. Pierre Fournier (1906-1986) was born in Paris on June 24, and known in his lifetime as "the aristocrat of cellists," because of his lyrical playing, and for his impeccable artistic sensitivity. Fournier was the son of a French army general, and as a child was taught piano by his mother. At the age of nine he suffered a mild case of polio, and lost some of the dexterity in his legs and feet. No longer able to master the use of the piano pedals, he searched for another musical instrument, and turned to the cello. He quickly made good progress on his new instrument, and was able to win entrance to the Paris Conservatoire, where he became a pupil of Paul Bazelaire, and later Anton Hekking. He graduated at the age of seventeen, in the year 1923. Maurice Marechal called him "the cellist of the future." Even at such a young age, Fournier had tremendous virtuosity, and was famous for his bowing facility. He enjoyed modern music, as well as classical. Many modern composers wrote works for him, including Martinu, Martinon and Poulenc. As a teacher Fournier insisted that his students develop a smooth tone, and a high elbow for the right arm. He believed that the Sevcik violin exercises were valuable for cellists who wanted to perfect bowing technique.

Ondine celebrates Beethoven’s 250th anniversary of birth by re-issuing Olli Mustonen’s Beethoven cycle with the Tapiola Sinfonietta. The three volumes were originally released in three separate volumes from 2007-2009. Mustonen, described by The Sunday Times as “living dream of pianism”, is known for delivering fresh and visionary approach to standard works – this is evident in these masterful recordings of Beethoven’s concertos. Mustonen is a particularly fitting exponent for Beethoven’s music as the composer himself was also both visionary and revolutionary in his approach to tradition. The recording of Piano Concerto No. 1 includes Mustonen’s own cadenzas. Beethoven’s own Piano Concerto arrangement of his Violin Concerto is also featured – one of Mustonen’s signature pieces.

REVIEW:

Mustonen plays the five concertos of a piece, not starting out with Mozartean elegance in the first two and building up to mature Beethoven somewhere in Concerto No. 3. He attacks every bar vigorously and with decisive intent. In my experience, no one since Mikhail Pletnev’s highly original and at times eccentric cycle on DG has sounded so personal in music that too often trips off the fingers with glib sameness.

My overall defense of a cycle that will strike other listeners as totally arbitrary comes down to Mustonen being a composer, not a touring pianist playing subscription concerts. These are a composer’s responses to Beethoven, and Mustonen has the fingers to express them with confident assurance and at times with dazzling flourishes. In my corner this release is one of the most refreshing of the Beethoven year.

– Fanfare

An important contribution to the Beethoven Year: Christoph Scheffelt plays all the bagatelles and the famous Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (WoO 59), commonly known as "F�r Elise." Christoph Scheffelt was born in 1981 in Santiago de Chile. In 2002 he completed his studies as a concert pianist with honors at the Universidad Cat�lica de Chile with Prof. Mar�a Iris Radrig�n. After four years of study with Prof. Rolf Plagge at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, he is awarded the title Magister Artium in 2006, also with honors. He completes his education, also with highest honors, as a master student of Prof. Homero Francesch at the Zurich University of the Arts. His concert activities, both as a soloist and as a member of the Eldering Ensemble, have taken him regularly through large parts of Western Europe, South America and Australia. Scheffelt is among others Winner of the renowned Rahn Music Prize, the "Claudio Arrau" Prize, as well as the Werner and Berti Alter Prize for Pedagogy.

The present release is both a continuation and the crowning of a project to record all of Ludwig van Beethoven’s five sonatas for piano and cello. It features three of them: in F major Op. 5 No. 1, in C major Op. 102 No. 1 and in D major Op. 102 No. 2. The first album in the project included the sonatas in G minor, Op. 5 No. 2, and in A major, Op. 69, with the selection of works for each release being a compromise between the duration of individual sonatas and the limit of recording time on a single album. Stanisław FIRLEJ is one of the leading Polish cellists. He received a thorough musical training which enabled him to develop an intensive con-cert activity not only in Poland, but also abroad. He studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow under Galina Kozolupova and Natalia Gutman, and subsequently graduated from André-Nicolas Navarra’s class at the “Accademia Chigiana” Summer Academy of Music in Siena. A professor of music, he runs a cello class at the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź. In 2015, he received an honorary doctor’s degree from the Academy. He also regularly teaches at masterclasses in Łańcut and Lusławice. Wojciech KUBICA’S wide-ranging repertoire spans music from the Baroque to the present. In 2003, he premiered Kyrie by Jan Wincenty Hawel at a recital during the Karol Szymanowski Festival in Zakopane, He has also pursued a teaching career as a faculty member at the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice (2005-2007), the Academy of Music in Wrocław (since 2005) and at the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź. In 2014, he received the title of Doctor of Musical Arts from the Łódź Academy.

The tour of Paris starts with the Eiffel Tower and includes the famous landmarks of the French capital, the Churches of Notre-Dame and the Sacre Coeur, the Opera Garnier and the great river, the Seine, that runs through the city. The tour ends with a nocturnal view of Paris and an excursion to Chartres, with it's magnificent cathedral. Music for the tour is by Beethoven, who at one time seemed to hope for employment in Paris. His 'Eroica Symphony' was at first intended as a celebration of his one-time hero, Napoleon, but reflected, in the end, his disillusion when Napoleon had himself crowned as Emperor. The music used also includes Beethoven's 'Coriolanus Overture', written, not for Shakespeare's play, but for a contemporary drama by Heinrich von Collin.

‘Haunting lyricist' or 'devil violinist' are terms critics use to describe impressions Manrico Padovani conveys with virtuosic, profound playing as well as flawless technique in his concerts. Here the fascination can be felt by means of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, the Romance No.2 as well as a Violin Sonata. Manrico Padovani, Swiss violinist of Italian origin is defined by critics as the "Wizard of the Violin" for his musical intensity and technical agility. He is not only a great musician able to excite and establish contact with his audience, but he involves and fascinates them by explaining classical music in a clear way, bringing it closer to everyone, even the youngest audience members.

The second volume of Giovanni Bellucci’s Beethoven cycle for Brilliant Classics takes the listener on a journey of six eventful years, from Op.22 of 1800 to the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata of 1806. During that time Beethoven established himself as Vienna’s pre-eminent pianist-composer. He came to regard Op.22 as the best of his ‘early’ sonatas but a sea-change in the deepening of his expression is already evident in the piano-writing of Op.26, with its funeral march ‘in memory of a hero’. There follow the remarkable formal innovations of the Op.27 pair – No.2 immortally inscribed on the popular imagination as the ‘Moonlight’ – and then the smooth, undulating rhythms of the ‘Pastorale’ Op.28. The trio of Op.31 sonatas present a study in contrasts, from the graceful profile of No.1 in G major to the sound and fury of the ‘Tempest’ No.2 and then the hectic momentum of No.3, presaging the concision of works at the end of his ‘middle’ period such as the ‘Serioso’ Quartet and the Eighth Symphony. The proportions of the two-movement Op.54 are even more tautly circumscribed, before the reach of Beethoven’s expressive range for his instrument expands to hitherto undreamt heights in the ‘Waldstein’ Op.53 and the ‘Appassionata’ Op.57. Giovanni Bellucci is among the most strikingly individual of modern pianists. Described by Italian critic Piero Rattalino as ‘a force of nature, vast and palpitating’, he cultivates an old-fashioned richness of piano timbre while still attending to the letter as well as the spirit of Beethoven’s scores. According to Le Monde, ‘he takes us back to the Golden Age of the Piano’. His recordings have been showered with prizes such as Diapason d’Or, Choc, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, CD Maestro etc.

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth, Sony Music Entertainment presents four major reissues devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven in its series of Classical Masters. Among the treasures in these new budget-priced sets are the complete symphonies, string quartets and violin sonatas performed by illustrious musicians of the past century.

The Italian violinist Uto Ughi studied with Enesco, was signed by EMI while still in his teens and went on to become a major RCA artist in the 1980s and 90s. In 1978, he recorded Beethoven’s 10 Violin Sonatas with Lamar Crowson, whom none less than Alfred Brendel described as “one of the finest chamber music pianists of our day”. The set was acclaimed on its release in Italy on LPs but has been largely unavailable since then, making this first release on four albums particularly enticing to the many admirers of these two superb musicians.

REVIEW:

Sony Classical’s budget price release of a 1978 Beethoven cycle originally issued by Dischi Ricordi featuring violinist Uto Ughi and pianist Lamar Crowson comes as a welcome surprise. The 34-year-old Ughi’s instrumental mastery and intelligent musicianship were captured at the cusp of his early maturity. His burnished, almost viola-like sonority is firmly focused in every register, abetted by impeccable intonation and a knack for tossing off the most difficult passagework with flawless ease. More to the point, however, Ughi consistently taps into the sometimes stressful dramatic, dynamic, and emotional contrasts that characterize Beethoven’s style, as does his expert collaborator Lamar Crowson.

The G major Op. 30 No. 3’s Allegro assai exemplifies this in how the duo offsets their fleet and winged treatment of Beethoven’s lyrical themes with appropriately hard-hitting szforzandos and driving climaxes. Another cogent case of “opposites attracting” can be found in both the refinement of the rapid runs and the unfettered dynamic surges in the A minor Op. 23 Allegro molto finale (sound clip). Listeners also will notice the playfully dovetailed imitative writing in the “Spring” and Op. 30 No. 2 Scherzi, and, conversely, the controlled rapture of Op. 96’s sublime central movement, where Ughi’s sheer tonal beauty and seamless bow control yield no quarter to the immense catalogue competition.

Each variation in the “Kreutzer” sonata’s middle movement conveys a distinct character, yet easily flows from one to the next. I also like how Ughi’s unexpected accents or points of emphasis appear to push the finale’s scurrying triplets ahead of the beat, yet never actually do so. In this sonata, however, Crowson proves less assertive a partner than the conductor/pianist Wolfgang Sawallisch in Ughi’s stunning and slightly superior early digital-era RCA Victor remake, coupled with the “Spring”. A pity that these later alternative readings didn’t find their way into this bargain box, along with Ughi’s still-artistically-competitive and long unavailable RCA Beethoven concerto with Sawallisch conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Still, the 1978 Ughi/Crowson cycle is a veritable sleeper, worth considering as a supplement alongside the Dumay/Pires, Perlman/Ashkenazy, and Grumiaux/Haskil reference versions.

-- ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Includes work(s) by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Both of these quartets are transcriptions of quintets for winds and piano by their respective composers but the links that bind them go much deeper. In the year after Mozart’s death, Beethoven began the draft of a work for the unusual instrumental ensemble of four wind instruments and piano. He was inspired by the similar work by Mozart, which had largely emancipated winds from their role in Harmoniemusik, employing them instead in the sophisticated ambience of chamber music. In this performance, following Beethoven’s own practice, the cadenzas in his quartet are improvised.

The Trio A Cordes Français was founded in 1959 by violinist Gérard Jarry (1936-2004), violist Serge Collot (1923-2015), and cellist Michel Tournus (1922-2006). In a career lasting over thirty years, they toured the world and made many notable recordings. At the age of fourteen, Gérard Jarry gained a Premier Grand Prix at the 1951 Concours Long-Thibaud. In addition to his many years performing with the Trio, he was concertmaster of the Orchestre de Chambre Jean-François Paillard, and a noted soloist. He was also a professor of violin at the Conservatoire de Paris. Serge Collot studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Maurice Vieux, graduating with a Premier Prix in 1944, he had a long and distinguished career as a chamber musician. He was particularly influential in encouraging the composition of contemporary works for viola by such composers as Boulez and Berio. Like his colleague Jarry, he was professor of viola at Conservatoire de Paris for many years. Michel Tournus gained Premiers Prix in cello and chamber music from the Conservatoire de Paris. He was also a member of several other chamber ensembles, including the Quatuor Indig and the Octuor de Paris. He was first cello with the Orchestre de l'Opera National de Paris. Active as a teacher at the Conservatoire de Musique de Versailles, and was the author of a cello method. It is inarguable that Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000) is not only one of the most celebrated flute players of all time but among the 20th century's most famous classical musicians. His recorded legacy is vast, comprising solo, orchestral, and chamber performances. Flutist Michel Debost (born 1934), a student of Marcel Moyse, has also won major competitions, and was first flute in the Orchestre de Paris. Replacing Rampal as flute professor at the Conservatoire de Paris, he later taught at Oberlin.

After decades of experience performing all of Beethoven’s piano music, the great Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, long renowned as “a true Beethoven authority” (Gramophone) and an artist of “immense and focused force” and “piano purism” (NPR), continues to set standards with his performances of the 32 sonatas all over the world. His cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas at the Semperoper in Dresden was recorded live and released in 2011 as a box by Sony/RCA Red Seal. In 2012 it won Buchbinder the prestigious Echo Klassik Award in the category “Instrumentalist of the year” and the Choc de l’année 2012. The original release made it to the Austrian Pop Charts and the Top 10 on the German Classical charts. Sony Classical now reissues this award-winning set on 9 albums.

Resound brings Beethoven’s symphonies and concertos back into the concert halls in which they were performed during the composer’s lifetime. Four of the six venues for the premieres of the nine symphonies still survive, as do the eight Viennese halls and theatres in which Beethoven’s orchestral works were played during his lifetime. The Orchester Wiener Akademie and its conductor Martin Haselböck continue the Resound Beethoven series, performed on period instruments and scrupulously respecting the orchestral layout of 200 years ago. Volume 7 is devoted to the Fourth Symphony, and the Piano Concerto No.4 in G major op.58, first performed in 1807. The recording took place in the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna, in the venue of their premiere in March 1807. The concerto is performed by the Austrian pianist Gottlieb Wallisch, who was also heard on the previous volume.

Includes work(s) by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Classical Music