Alicia de Larrocha's Beethoven is 'central' in the most constructive sense of that term—in other words, moderately paced, warm-hearted, cleanfingered and free of attention-seeking mannerisms. Tilson Thomas reflects her comparatively romantic bias—this isn't quite the superfine Beethoven of his ECO symphony cycle—and has the LSO support her with poise and propriety. The Sonata is equally composed, though here de Larrocha traces some interesting contrapuntal detail (at the beginning of the Andante, for example).

-- Gramophone [12/1993]
reviewing these performances included as part of RCA 61675

BEETHOVEN Missa Solemnis • John Eliot Gardiner, cond; Lucy Crowe (s); Jennifer Johnson (mez); James Gilchrist (t); Matthew Rose (bs); Monteverdi Ch; O Révolutionnaire et Romantique • SOLI DEO GLORIA 718 (69:58 Text and Translation) Live: London 10/17/2012


When I first opened the foldout CD packaging and noted that Gardiner’s performance of the Missa Solemnis runs only 70 minutes, I immediately became crestfallen. That timing seemed to me ridiculously brief for this massive work. True, William Steinberg produced a beautifully phrased and well chiseled performance in 74:31, but that is four and a half minutes longer, just as Toscanini’s last (1953) version is around 73 minutes. Yet that last Toscanini performance always sounded a bit short-breathed to me, especially when compared to his two greatest versions, the 1935 one with the New York Philharmonic (a performance that clocked in around 86 minutes) and the 1940 NBC broadcast (which came in a few seconds under 80 minutes). Both of those had a breadth and spaciousness that almost sounded unearthly, so spectacular was his phrasing, and both had quartets of soloists that one could only dream of in one’s wildest imagination. In 1935 they were Elisabeth Rethberg, Marion Telva, Giovanni Martinelli, and Ezio Pinza, and in 1940 they were Zinka Milanov, Bruna Castagna, Jussi Björling, and Alexander Kipnis.


Imagine my surprise and delight, then, to start listening to this performance and be absolutely charmed and seduced by Gardiner’s tempos and phrasing. It turns out that the fairly quick timing of this performance is caused by his accelerating the fast sections of the work, particularly the Finale and part of the Sanctus, neither of which I have ever heard played so fast in my life, but in those particular sections the music can take it. Otherwise, this is a surprisingly fluid and flexible reading, not only leisurely where you like to hear it so but also with innumerable rubato touches and other little niceties that make the score sound more elastic and bring the phrasing to vivid life.


As for the soloists, all are fine, although tenor Gilchrist was not in good voice at the outset. He sounds rather wobbly throughout the Kyrie and the beginning of the Gloria, only bringing his voice into focus halfway through the latter; from that point on, he is fine. The other soloists are excellent from their very first notes, and the Monteverdi Choir sounds transcendent. I was also a bit uneasy about hearing the Missa played by a historically informed orchestra. Even though the music is mostly at a slow tempo and only occasionally explosive, I just couldn’t wrap my head around hearing this piece played by no-vibrato strings, but there, too, I was in for a pleasant surprise. The strings of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique do not whine and drone like a MIDI, but rather play with a lovely sheen and at times even with warmth, something I wouldn’t have thought possible prior to hearing this release.


Moreover, by using what is almost a chamber orchestra (66 musicians plus the organ, played here by James Johnstone) and most certainly a chamber choir (45 voices, 25 of which are women), one hears “through” the textures in a way that only a master of orchestral transparency like Toscanini was able to bring out using conventional symphonic forces. In toto, then, I found this an extraordinarily fine performance and moving experience, certainly one of the jewels of Gardiner’s catalog of recordings.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Classical Music

"Every so often, you come across a performance that renders you powerless to resist, that sweeps you away with it, that reminds you of why you fell in love with music in the first place" (The Globe and Mail)Tafelmusik is thrilled to present its live recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony — the final work in the orchestra’s complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies, which began 18 years ago. With the September 30, 2016 release, Tafelmusik makes history as the first North American orchestra to have recorded all nine Beethoven symphonies on period instruments. The recording took place February 4 through 7, 2016, during a series of sold-out, critically acclaimed public performances in Toronto’s Koerner Hall, with conductor Bruno Weil leading the combined forces of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir, and guest soloists Sigrid Plundrich, soprano; Mary-Ellen Nesi, mezzo-soprano; Colin Balzer, tenor; and Simon Tischler, bass-baritone. “We approach the Beethoven concerts and recording as if they were the very first performances, as though the music had been composed yesterday. This is the real thing — there’s no sense of routine with Tafelmusik musicians and everybody’s playing with a full heart and a full soul and spirit. That is the secret to a great performance,” stated Maestro Weil, who marks the 25th anniversary of his first collaboration with Tafelmusik this year.

Wilhelm Furtwaengler conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony more than 100 times. + In August 1954, three months before his death, he directed his last performance in Lucerne, leading the Philharmonia Orchestra and a stellar cast of soloists (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elsa Cavelti, Ernst Haefliger and Otto Edelmann), which proved to be an "elemental musical event" (Neue Zuercher Zeitung). + For this release, the original tapes from the SRF archives have been newly re-mastered, and crucially, the pitch adjusted, bringing the audio, for the first time, as close to the original as possible.

Includes son(s) for vln and pno by Ludwig van Beethoven. Soloists: Pamela Frank, Claude Frank.

Only a little chamber music for flute by Beethoven has survived. He was not particularly fond of this instrument. However, he managed to pen an elegant, nimble Serenade, op. 25, which the Ardinghello Ensemble is now releasing along with a new rendering of the magnificent String Trio op. 3.

For the Ardinghello Ensemble Beethoven stands at the beginning of an epoch of special interest. The four instrumentalists performing with Karl Kaiser – all of them women – very undogmatically operate with insights provided by historical performance practice and set out in quest of the “Faraway Sound” of romanticism - while discovering unheard-of and never-expected material.

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9 • Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond; Tilla Briem (sop); Elisabeth Höngen (alt); Peter Anders (ten); Rudolf Watzke (bs); Bruno Kittel Ch; Berlin PO • MUSIC & ARTS 1276, mono (73:12) Live: Berlin 3/22 & 24/1942


This is the most famous performance of the Beethoven Ninth ever given by a non-traditional, i.e. eccentric, conductor whose work lies mainly outside the musical mainstream. Furtwängler justified his brushing aside written tempos, tempo relationships, and other items within a score that one would perceive as musical by the belief—instilled in him as a young man and reiterated by his carefully-chosen circle of friends—that he was the most spiritual conductor of his time and the guardian of German Art, which he believed superior to all others. Thus in his mind, anything he did with a score was justified by his spirituality, which trumped all other considerations.


Within that set of rules, however, this performance has achieved an almost mythic status. Roughly 40 years ago, I was told (erroneously) that this performance was given in Hitler’s presence to celebrate his birthday, but that Furtwängler in essence hurled Beethoven’s message of joy and brotherhood down his throat with the ferocity of this performance. That, of course, is untrue, but it was true that by 1942 Furtwängler, who chose to remain in Nazi Germany to help preserve German Art in his own way (and help protect Jewish musicians in the Berlin Philharmonic), was not merely disillusioned but disgusted by the actions of his government and depressed by the fact that they went about purging Europe of Jews. Yet although Furtwängler never joined the Nazi Party, wore a swastika armband, or gave the Nazi salute, he tacitly supported the National Socialists because they constantly used his name and image to promote the very “Great German Art” of which he considered himself the high priest. And, according to Fred K. Prieberg’s remarkable book, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler in the Third Reich (Northeastern University Press, 1994), Furtwängler’s fluid and eccentric tempos were already falling out of favor with some German critics by the late 1930s. The conductor even petitioned Goebbels to “remove” certain critics who said negative things about his work because they obviously didn’t understand how great and holy he was. It was a dangerous high-wire act that he walked, and in the end it cost him a few years as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.


One of the problems of this recording was that it derived from Russian archival copies of RGG tapes, which contained peak and intermodular distortion. There were also small but discernible pitch fluctuations throughout. I recall a CD copy I once owned on the Price-less label (remember them?) that sounded as if the recording was made on a slab of granite by a stone cutting stylus, with blasting at all peaks of volume. In this pressing, taken from a digital copy newly remastered by Aaron Z. Snyder in 2012 (when Music & Arts issued it as part of 4-CD set 4049), pitch wavering and discernible surface noise have been corrected, but the top range still shows signs of blasting at peak volume and, by and large, the treble end is dull, not at all realistic-sounding—more like Furtwängler’s early Polydor recordings than the clear, translucent EMI recordings of the 1930s.


Within his own odd set of rules, however, it is primarily the first movement that comes off the worst. This seems to have been a constant for him: I’ve heard four Furtwängler Ninths (this one, the 1951 Bayreuth performance, and both of his 1954 performances), and none are convincing here. His intent seems to have been to depict the chaos of creation, or as he put it, “the primeval beginning of time, out of which everything evolved,” but in each performance those opening measures—and several minutes thereafter—sound logy and earthbound, more like something crawling back into the ocean that out of it. Of the four versions I’ve heard, this one is by far the most sluggish; it is not until just before the nine-minute mark that his tempo finally starts to come up to something approaching normal, albeit still slower than score. His second movement, however, is really splendid, and by contrast points out how unnaturally stiff and metronomic Toscanini’s tempo is in the December 1939 Ninth with the NBC Symphony. Furtwängler introduces some beautifully relaxed ritards here and there, and in the middle of the trio section (when the winds are playing) pulls back on the beat. The first time or two, it is exquisite; at the third and fourth points at which he does this, however, it is too slack, causing the music to lose momentum and almost collapse before the syncopated string figure that opened the movement returns, snapping the orchestra back to attention.


This is the slowest of his surviving accounts of the third movement (a little over 20 minutes), and like nearly all of his performances of the Symphony, it contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful playing within a consistently slow tempo, but here Furtwängler reveals his uncanny ability to make the music “float,” a quality much coveted in this movement by Toscanini, who only managed it a few times (oddly enough, one of them being the December 1939 Ninth previously mentioned). This is undoubtedly the one movement that most influenced younger German and Austrian conductors, from Schmidt-Isserstedt to Karajan, as they all emulated him in this regard. Then comes the fiery and electrifying final movement, in which the conductor’s whipping up of tempo is matched by his ability to draw the most astonishing playing out of his musicians—they respond as if possessed, as do the soloists and the Bruno Kittel Choir. Even if he was not really trying to hurl Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the face of Hitler, one definitely gets the feeling that, in his mind on that day, this Ode to Joy had become an act of defiance, almost distorting the music (and words) to produce an almost apocalyptic vision of the score. In short, one gets the feeling that Furtwängler was not certain whether he, or German art, would survive the Nazi horror, the war, and the Holocaust.


Despite my misgivings about tempos and phrasing here and there, this still remains a remarkable document. It is not my favorite Beethoven Ninth—that honor goes to Karajan’s 1975 (or 1976) recording with Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Agnes Baltsa, Peter Schreier, and José van Dam and the Berlin Philharmonic—but it is, on balance, Furtwängler’s best reading of the score. One might, in fact, replace the first movement of this version with the first movement of the August 1954 performance, which is not perfect but a little better, to get this conductor’s best approach to the Ninth. And one should remember that, in spite all of his loose tempos and fluctuations, Toscanini was greatly impressed by the feeling that Furtwängler was able to bring out in his performances, in certain works (Wagner, the Tchaikovsky Sixth, and the Mozart 40th symphonies) being influenced by the younger conductor. This, then, is certainly not a first choice Ninth in my view, but a necessary third or fourth recording to have around for the good things in it, which are many.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

This recording also includes a lecture by Leonard Bernstein on the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, entitled "How a Great Symphony Was Written". Leonard Bernstein recorded the lecture in four different languages including English. To listen to a desired language, the stereo balance has to be turned to favor one of the audio speakers. On some players a mono button can be pressed to make the selected channel signal balance in both speakers.

As with the Stravinsky CD I reviewed recently, this issue contains music conducted by Leonard Bernstein followed by a talk discussing aspects of that music. This time it’s Beethoven, and the most celebrated of the symphonies, the fifth. In fact, the illustrated talk was recorded some five years before the symphony, at a time when Bernstein was giving full rein to his educational pursuits.

The talk is quite brief, and, a little frustratingly, discusses only the first movement of the symphony. It’s well worth hearing, though, for Bernstein gives a fascinating insight into the composer’s working processes. As a creative artist himself, he understood these processes well, and he drives home how the apparent inevitability of the way one idea follows another in the symphonic argument was in fact the outcome of a detailed and lengthy sifting and rejection of material and treatment. This applies even to details of the orchestration, and it is revealing to hear, for example, the famous opening with the addition, as Beethoven originally intended, of flutes to the strings. It sounds most peculiar, and one has to agree with Bernstein that the final version that we know today has far greater power of utterance.

I suppose that Beethoven is not a composer one immediately associates with Bernstein, as one does Mahler, Stravinsky or Copland for example. But his music meant an enormous amount to the American maestro, and one of his very last public musical acts was, famously, to conduct Beethoven’s 9th in Berlin soon after the destruction of the Wall. This 5th, though it will not be to everyone’s taste, is a performance of enormous character and commitment. For me, the first movement is the least convincing; it has a breadth and a seeming lack of urgency which is almost perverse. It is, as a performance, the diametric opposite to the Harnoncourt/Norrington school; nonetheless, on its own terms, it works, for the surge of energy which occurs in the coda has the sense of a dam bursting, of pent-up energy surging forth. There are some telling details, too, with, for example, the oboe emerging from the texture before its solo cadenza (track 1, around 5:10).

The Andante is beautifully done, at a serenely flowing tempo, and with flexible, expressive playing from wind and strings, despite a surprising split note from 2nd trumpet (track 2 around 3:12). The scherzo, interestingly, is on the quick side, and Bernstein emphasises the light and shade, giving the music a suitably furtive feel. And as you might expect from this most theatrical (in the best sense!) of conductors, the tense transition to the fourth movement is magnificently done, with the great crescendo held back to the very last moment carrying us into the triumphant blaze of the finale’s opening theme. And once more, Bernstein’s sheer commitment and energy keeps the momentum of this movement up to the very end, particularly impressive when – as the disc’s liner notes proudly announce – this is a performance with all the repeats in place. Well, that’s not rare these days, though it is surprising how many conductors still do omit the exposition repeat in the finale. All told, a highly successful performance, typical of the conductor in its expressive power and dynamism, but completely free of his less admirable mannerisms.

- Gwyn Parry-Jones, MusicWeb International

BEETHOVEN Symphonies Nos. 4 1 and 7 2 • Nicholas McGegan, cond; Philharmonia Baroque O (period instruments) • PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE PRODUCTIONS 06 (75:10) Live: Berkeley 1 11/10-11/2012, 2 9/12-13/2009


Unlike a number of other conductors in the early music movement, Nicholas McGegan has waited a long time to commit any of the Beethoven symphonies to disc. The wait has been well worthwhile. These are now my favorite period performance versions of the Fourth and Seventh symphonies on CD. I previously had preferred the Fourth of John Eliot Gardiner. It is faster than McGegan’s in every movement, sometimes significantly so. I feel that McGegan’s tempos allow the music to breathe more and to build up more natural climaxes. Gardiner uses a larger string section, which produces a wider dynamic range than McGegan’s. But McGegan’s orchestra sounds better balanced to me, with the strings allowing for richer textures from the inner voices. Interestingly, both conductors employ the same principal flute, the excellent Janet See, whose album of Vivaldi concertos with McGegan and the PBO is well worth seeking out. In the opening movement of the Fourth, McGegan’s Adagio is like a journey through the Greek underworld, leading to an Allegro vivace that feels like the whole world springing to life. Its development section sounds very Viennese in its congeniality. The second movement resembles chamber music, similar to a Buddhist scroll painting in its play of light and shade. It is significant that McGegan’s violin section includes such period chamber music luminaries as Katherine Kyme, Elizabeth Blumenstock, and Jolianne von Einem. The third movement displays Olympian humor, while the last is very danceable, sort of Beethoven’s version of a hoedown. In both symphonies, McGegan is very generous with repeats.


One of the principal attractions of McGegan’s Seventh is timpanist Kent Reed. Over 20 years ago, I heard a splendid Seventh by the New Jersey Symphony conducted by my friend Jens Nygaard, in which the timpanist, Randall Hicks, really whaled away. The critic assigned to the concert complained that it sounded like a timpani concerto. By now, we are so accustomed to the thwack of period timpani that Reed’s performance doesn’t seem unusual. Before hearing McGegan, my favorite period Seventh was Roger Norrington’s Stuttgart account. He is more fastidious in the middle movements about Beethoven’s metronome markings, though McGegan’s tempos there feel less rushed. Norrington’s strings, modern instruments played without vibrato, make a thicker, less appealing sound than McGegan’s more gossamer section. What’s more, McGegan conducts the entire symphony with a Beechamesque twinkle in his eye that Norrington lacks. The introduction to McGegan’s first movement is fleet-footed, with beautiful wind playing. The main section features wonderful waves of sound that ebb and flow, while the coda offers splendidly braying horns. McGegan’s slow movement is measured, with a careful delineation of dynamics. Its sensation is that of a haunted, misty reverie. The third movement feels as if the different sections of the orchestra are engaged in a conversation. Its trio sounds like an ecstatic shepherd’s song. The concluding movement is a jolly, mercurial romp. McGegan’s Seventh, congenial as it is, is one you can live with very easily.


The sound engineering in both symphonies is excellent. If you are looking for these works on modern instruments, I would recommend George Szell in Cleveland for the Fourth and Karl Böhm with the Vienna Philharmonic for the Seventh, although his Berlin account is nearly as good. McGegan’s album is a marvelous blend of the wisdom of the old master conductors with the finesse of period instruments. His Beethoven is an extremely likable fellow of vast ingenuity, an artist with whose work you never are sated. There is not one unconsidered bar of music in the whole album.


FANFARE: Dave Saemann

A MusicWeb Internaional Recording Of The Month

Somehow this series had escaped my attention and that of my fellow reviewers at MusicWeb International. In my defence, as surveyor of the piano trio repertoire, I did say that I couldn’t possibly hope to cover all recordings of the big names.

Naming your ensemble after a famous composer, especially one whose works you have chosen to begin your recording career, does create something of an expectation of a “special” relationship. Violinist Verena Stourzh has “form” here, as she was a member of the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt until its disbanding in 2010. I’m pleased to report that in this volume at least, TrioVanBeethoven does have a special relationship with the great one, as they have given us stunningly good performances here.

Beethoven’s piano trios, for me, are the least stormy, most cheerful of his output. In part, this may be due to their relatively early composition. Even the final, and perhaps greatest of them - the Archduke, op. 97 - was written in his middle period. There are none to parallel the ground-breaking late quartets and piano sonatas.

The two complete works presented here are among his sunniest. His three Opus 1 trios are very much in the mould of Haydn and Mozart, and are considered by some to be lesser works. Mature Beethoven they may not be, but I have a great deal of affection for them, and especially No. 2. No. 6 may be somewhat dwarfed by those chronologically before (Ghost) and after (Archduke) but is still a great work.

My yardstick for the Beethoven trios is the Florestan Trio (review) and that remains so, despite the very significant impression that TrioVanBeethoven has made on me here. The Florestans give a brilliant performance, and I employ that adjective for both its meanings: splendid/excellent and glittering/bright. TrioVanBeethoven give a more genial and spacious reading of both works, especially Op. 1/2, where they take almost three minutes more. This is a smiling, playful even relaxed Beethoven, not necessarily adjectives normally applied to him, but not out of place in this work. Trio No. 6 is taken similarly, though the difference to the Florestans is less here. In case you begin to think these are old-fashioned big Romantic performances, let me assure you that they are not. There is nothing heavy about them; somehow TrioVanBeethoven have managed to balance a lightness of touch with a sense of repose. They provide a quite complementary view to the Florestans, whose brilliance might even be too dazzling, depending on your mood.

The sound quality lives up to the performances: immediate, natural and without any extraneous breathing or mechanical noises. When you factor in informative liner notes, you have the complete package. I’m off to buy Volumes 1 & 2, and I look forward to Volume 4 – may it not take too long to arrive.

– MusicWeb International (David Barker)

With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios. That the C minor trio was pioneering is illustrated by the fact that Haydn, who at the time was Beethoven’s teacher, advised against its publication. He feared that it would not ‘be understood so quickly and easily’ – but the world as Haydn knew it was clearly changing and the trios became a commercial success as well as harbingers of a new musical aesthetic. Some twenty years later, in 1813 when E. T.A. Hoffmann reviewed the two Op. 70 trios, the new era was firmly established, and to Hoffmann the works confirmed ‘how Beethoven carries the Romantic spirit of music deep within his soul’. Between the two complete trios recorded here, the Sitkovetskys include Beethoven’s last contribution to the piano trio genre, the little Allegretto in B flat major, WoO 39. It was composed in June 1812 for Maximiliane Brentano, the ten-year-old daughter of Franz and Antonie Brentano – or, as it says on the title page of the autograph manuscript, ‘for my little friend Maxe Brentano, to encourage her piano playing’.

Alpha continues to explore its catalogue and this year again offers a wide variety of combinations. After a box assembling the gems of the Baroque era (Masters of the Baroque - Alpha 372), the piano is now given pride of place. The box set Masters of the Piano brings together 10 albums in which great contemporary interpreters (Nelson Goerner, Alexander Lonquich, François-Frédéric Guy, Eric Le Sage, Edna Stern, Anna Vinnitskaya) retrace three centuries of creation on the piano, from Bach to Shostakovich, by way of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Debussy. The piano will also be at the heart of a 7-release box set devoted to Alexei Lubimov’s recordings. Fortepiano, piano, prepared piano . . . the Russian musician has distinguished himself in every repertoire. Finally, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, the Beethoven Rediscovered box highlights 16 albums that offer a chance to rediscover his symphonies, concertos and sonatas on period instruments, the fortepiano, etc.

Past praise of the previously released volumes included in this set:

Beethoven/Liszt: Complete Symphonies / Martynov

Yury Martynov is one of the few pianists around with the technical resources, musical grasp and conviction to recreate this legacy persuasively. In doing so, he amply demonstrates its continued usefulness and vitality. It seems safe to say that he has given us the Beethoven-Liszt cycle for our time, and one unlikely soon to be superseded.

– Gramophone

Beethoven: Piano Concertos No 1 & 2 / Schoonderwoerd, Ensemble Cristofori

Passagework is never rattled off mechanically, always expressively shaped. The slow movements are both memorably beautiful. The recording is close, in a richly resonant acoustic; everything is extremely vivid, with Schoonderwoerd’s breathing often audible, though not distractingly. Mandatory listening for anyone with the slightest interest in Beethoven performance practice.

– Fanfare

The meticulous workmanship and musical intelligence informing Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s previous Beethoven cycle installment are equally apparent throughout this third and final volume. In contrast to numerous brisk and suavely dispatched renditions of Op. 54’s toccata-like finale, Bavouzet’s deliberation imparts an almost jazzy inner rhythm to the swirling textures and syncopated accents.

The “Appassionata” first movement stands out for Bavouzet’s firm backbone and stinging clarity. Don’t let the central movement’s genially inflected second variation fool you into thinking that the basic tempo is being markedly modified. By contrast, the finale’s Presto contains a fascinating detail I’ve heard in no other recording: Here Bavouzet makes an unwritten accelerando that enhances the big build leading into the final peroration–a bit theatrical, granted, but the effect works brilliantly.

The disarming lyricism of Op. 78’s first movement is undermined by Bavouzet’s overly intellectualized detailing, while the finale is too sedate for what ought to be a playful and brash vivace. Nor does Bavouzet’s thoughtfully articulated Op. 79 match the offhand joy and animation served up by Kempff or Schnabel, while the “Les Adieux” sonata’s outer movements don’t equal the soaring thrust of Solomon’s classic recording. However, Bavouzet’s Op. 90 is a marvel of textural organization and assiduous transitions.

The crispness and transparency Bavouzet brings to Op. 101’s challenging fugue also informs his tautly unfolding Op. 106 fugal finale. The disparate elements characterizing the introductory Largo leading into the fugue, however, seem disconnected in Bavouzet’s hands. I like Bavouzet’s leanness and poise in the first movement, but I miss the sweeping arcs and nervous energy that others bring to the music, as well as the “inspired misprint” A-sharp in the chains of broken fifths and sixths that occur just before the recapitulation (Bavouzet plays the “corrected” A-natural favored by Kempff and Brendel). The Scherzo’s minor-key Trio section is too square for the rhythmic asymmetry to register, and Bavouzet’s big ritard when the main theme momentarily appears in B minor makes Beethoven’s intended surprise all too obvious. The pianist saves his most emotionally engaging work for a fluid, warm-toned Adagio.

Bavouzet’s graceful and poetic Op. 109 first movement dovetails right into the Prestissimo, where the pianist uncommonly differentiates detached and sustained phrase markings in the manner of Charles Rosen, Annie Fischer, and Freddy Kempf. The third-movement variations cohere by way of Bavouzet’s carefully unified tempo relationships, a virtue that also pertains to Op. 110’s finale.

You’ll also notice the point and precision on the bass trills leading from Op. 111’s Maestoso introduction into the Allegro proper, plus Bavouzet’s sophisticated shaping of the rapid unison lines. The Arietta theme is brisk but sensitively phrased, while a strong left hand presence provides an anchoring counterpart to the long chains of trills toward the movement’s end. It’s not an epic Op. 111 on the level of Pollini’s Apollonian reserve or Arrau’s expansive canvas; still, many pianists would be happy to claim Bavouzet’s authority and mastery. In sum, the best of Bavouzet’s Beethoven interpretations impart a fresh spin on thrice-familiar music without drawing attention away from the composer. That’s no small achievement.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

When I was young, there were three pianists whom I always hoped to be able to hear in person, Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, and Arthur Rubenstein. I finally heard all three, Horowitz only once. These were, of course, the most high-profile pianists living in the United States in the post-WW II years, and all three had prominent recording contracts to keep their names available.

I don’t suppose I have heard these (1962–63) recordings for 30 or more years, and revisiting old pleasures can be a disappointing experience. My youthful enthusiasm anointed Serkin as the ultimate keeper of Beethoven’s flame and relegated Rubinstein to the category of a good show. Time and experience tempered these judgments, as they must, and hearing Rubinstein live several times certainly gave nuance to what a “good show” ought to be. I think what finally did it was letting myself hear Rubinstein’s astonishing sense of line and delicacy of touch, which drew rather than propelled us through even the well-known bars of the “Moonlight” Sonata. I have always admired the way his playing makes each note suggest there is an obvious following one that will appear in its due course. Above all, in his playing there is the sense of the sheer pleasure he takes in it. By this I do not mean he is self-indulgent or willful or careless. On the contrary. Though I recall him as a good showman and though there was the occasional fluff, I always had the sense that when he sat down at the piano, Beethoven came first.

The sonatas here are the “warhorses” of the repertoire, of course, and there is good reason for that: they are sturdy stuff. But how many actually play the triplets of the first movement of No. 14 “with a most delicate touch,” as Beethoven asks of the whole movement, and make them go somewhere? How many can? Rubinstein does so and uses that to create an urgency only released by the arrival of the tune in m. 10, a melody, in turn, urged toward its resolution in m. 22. What sets Rubinstein apart for me is that he does this not by driving us through the music but by drawing us along with it: this is not Bach à la Beethoven. This is not to say that Rubinstein is all delicacy: subtlety need not be understated, nor passion overplayed. There is fire enough when called for, as in the last movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, for example. In 29/6, James Reel called this playing “poetic,” and we have need of such poetry today.

FANFARE: Alan Swanson Reviewing earlier release