Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony remains to this day the only work that does not belong to the Bayreuth canon – “Wagner’s Ten”, so to speak – and yet has nevertheless been performed on the Green Hill along with them. Both within and without the Bayreuth walls, the performance history of this symphony is associated with no conductor more than with Wilhelm Furtwängler. The opening performance of the first post-War Bayreuth Festival in 1951 was of Beethoven’s Ninth under Furtwängler, and there already exists an Orfeo release based on the original radio broadcast. Several technical hurdles had to be overcome before the performance of 1954 could also be released on CD, however, for none of the accessible sources could be prepared satisfactorily without employing the most modern mastering possibilities. The result is undoubtedly a vital document: both for those interested in the history of the Bayreuth Festival and for those who are enthused by the concurrent continuity and constant change that is a hallmark of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s style of interpretation. This Ninth would be his farewell to Bayreuth and was in fact one of his very last concerts anywhere, for it took place just three months before his death. Its interpretation is more direct and less ceremonial than in earlier recordings under this great conductor. In the last bars of this symphony’s famous choral finale he achieves a climax not just through his scorching pace, but also through a well-nigh breathless intensification of the musical content. The Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra and the solo quartet (led by the Dutch soprano Gré Brouwenstijn, here in magnificent voice) follow the maestro’s beat even here with an unmistakeable sense of tension and the utmost, unrelenting attention. It is surely herein that lies the secret of the fascination that Furtwängler exudes to this day. As perhaps no other conductor he always understood how to avoid the routine in the works that he conducted so many times. Instead he was time and again able to summon up and maintain an awareness of them as something extraordinary and unique: for himself, his fellow musicians and his listeners.

In this 1983 performance, Maazel conducts Beethoven's liberation opera full of energy and precision, partnered by a highly dramatic Leonore, a Florestan in heroic voice and the Vienna Philharmonic in brilliant form.

The well-known “classical” exception to the canon of ten Wagner works that can be performed on the Green Hill goes back to the master himself: it is of course Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The most famous recording of one of the rare Bayreuth performances of the symphony is of the legendary concert that reopened the Bayreuth Festival after the war, in 1951, with Wilhelm Furtwangler on the rostrum. That recording was released for the first time, officially and uncut, by Orfeo in association with the Bayreuth Festival in 2008 (C754081). In 1954, Furtwangler conducted the Ninth a second time (ORFEO C851121). Much less well-known and issued here for the first time in a live recording is a performance conducted by Karl Böhm in 1963 to mark the 150th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth and the 80th anniversary of his death. Here we witness the emergence of a new musical generation.

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REVIEW:

While a distinct improvement on previous exhumations which have done the rounds, Orfeo's excellent new transfer from a Bavarian Radio source only serves to clarify how much Gundula Janowitz dominated her colleagues on this occasion, though they were all more seasoned Bayreuth performers. A significant release from an historical point of view.

– Gramophone

It is exceptionally interesting to hear now, for the first time, Daniel Barenboim at the age of 27 making his solo debut with an all-Beethoven programme, as Barenboim is today so esteemed and authoritative a figure in so many genres and forms of classical music and, now a mere 74, is heir to older traditions with greater historical depth than any of his contemporaries. At the time Barenboim had only just begun to unfold as a musical all-rounder and was at the zenith of a career that hitherto had concentrated on the piano. In the context of marked divergences between successive generations, common in the music world at that time, Barenboim asserts himself confidently and brilliantly, with remarkable pianistic eloquence and above all an array of musical virtues: the ability to generate tension and great contemplative depth, a highly imaginative conception, a very wide dynamic range and an amazing songfulness which has lost none of its power to captivate – as in the breathtaking slow movement of op. 10 No. 3, in a Waldstein Sonata with a daringly opened-up final movement as well as in an op. 111 with passages of heavenly length in the Arietta.

The Missa solemnis was Beethoven’s reaction to his student Arch-Duke Rudolph, youngest brother to Emperor Franz I of Austria, being appointed Arch-Bishop of Olmütz in 1819. A spontaneous decision to write this music without a direct commission. He planned for the oevre to be completed on the occasion of Rudolph’s enthronement on March 19, 1820, but the work proved to be much more difficult for the composer than he had anticipated, and accordingly the premiere did not take place for another four years – on April 7, 1824 in a charity concert of the Philharmonic Society St. Petersburg. It is not easy for the Missa solemnis today. This extraordinary work does not appear in the concert programmes as often as it still did some years ago. “The world of shareholder values doesn’t care for Christ”, as Michael Gielen says. He states that this is one of the reasons for the difficulties this work seems to cause audiences today. Michael Gielen, who passed away in March 2019, can be heard in this historical recording from 1985 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

This version of the three-act Leonore (1805) was recorded during a concert performance in the Grand Hall of the Vienna Musikverein on December 14th, 1970. Starring as Fidelio/Leonore and Florestan were Gwyneth Jones and James King, who were incomparable in these roles at the time. The rest of the cast also include outstanding singers of the age, above all Theo Adam as Pizarro, Gerd Nienstedt as Rocco, Rotraud Hansmann as Marzelline, Werner Hollweg as Jaquino and Eberhard Waechter as Don Fernando. At the beginning, there is the Leonore Overture No. 2, thrillingly performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Carl Melles.

These Bavarian Radio recordings, first released in 2005, constitute Rudolf Serkin's third and final edition of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos, and were the only performances to be recorded in the concert hall, not in the studio. As such, they fittingly complete both his discography and his artistic legacy as one of the 20th century’s indisputably great pianists. This jewel case presentation, complete with booklet notes in German and English, is a re-release of the original 3-album box set that went out of stock following healthy sales.

REVIEWS:

For at least a half century Beethoven’s piano concertos played a central role in Rudolf Serkin’s repertoire. Yet out of all the Serkin Beethoven concerto cycles on disc, the present one, recorded over the course of three concerts in October and November of 1977, offers the most consistent artistic and sonic satisfaction.

The slightly distant yet attractively robust engineering conveys a cogent sense of concert hall-realism, and not just to the benefit of Rafael Kubelik’s superb Bavarian musicians. It also reveals Serkin’s elusive, difficult-to-record sonority in more flattering, three-dimensional light than the gaunt, often monochrome impression one gleans from his Columbia Masterworks sessions. As a result, the concentration and inner tension Serkin brings to the slow movements comes off with more warmth and sustaining power.

Although Serkin at 74 may not have been the impetuous, fiery virtuoso in the first three concertos’ finales that he was in his 40s, when he recorded them for CBS Masterworks, his technique nevertheless is still assured, alert, and responsive, and far more energized than in his relatively careful and labored collaborations with Ozawa.

However, Serkin must have drunk from the fountain of youth before hitting the stage for the Choral Fantasy (Kubelik, too, for that matter). The performance radiates inspiration from start to finish, highlighted by Serkin’s ardent yet cannily structured opening cadenza, the chamber episodes’ zestful give and take, plus massed choral and orchestral tuttis that at once communicate elemental power and textural clarity. Let’s hope this major addition to Serkin’s discography will encourage Sony not to leave its own complete Serkin edition hanging.

For all fans of the pianist and/or the conductor, this release is a must.

--ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

This recording of Serkin from 1977 highlights a 20th-century great who brought musical purpose and intellectual rigour to every detail. Serkin ranks among the greatest of 20th-century pianists; his repertoire ranged from Bach to Reger, but Beethoven was always at its very heart. In the autumn of 1977, in the Herkulessaal in Munich, he played all five Beethoven concertos as well as the Choral Fantasy in a series of concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík, another musician who, like Serkin, always put himself at the service of the music. Recordings of those performances were first released on disc in 2005...their reissue now makes available again what is in every respect a historic musical document.

Serkin was never interested in ingratiating himself through honeyed phrases or silken tone. Instead in these interpretations there is musical purpose and intellectual rigor in every detail. Whether it’s the almost combative muscularity he brings to the piano’s first entry in the third concerto, or the instant authority of his torrential opening to the Emperor, it sets the tone for all that follows, constantly drawing equally intense responses from Kubelík and his superb orchestra. The accounts of the slow movements are just as remarkable; there’s a hymn-like calm to the Largo of the third, a consoling sweetness to the fourth’s exchanges between the soloist and the orchestra. All are in short, remarkable performances, not only among the finest available on disc, but further reminders of just how peerless a Beethoven interpreter Serkin was.

--The Guardian (Andrew Clements)