Beethoven in chamber music: the Septet as a chamber music original and the transcription of the Eroica Symphony for piano quartet and double bass showcases not only the palpable and explosive power of Beethoven's music, but also the flexibility and spontaneity of CHAARTS Chamber Artists.

Rudolf Kempe (1910–1976) was born near Dresden and in 1930 joined the celebrated Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra as first oboe. After his debut as a conductor in 1935, he joined the German army in 1942 but was ‘retired’ the same year and went back to conducting. A large number of engagements followed after the War, at the Saxon State Opera, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and as music director of the Bavarian State Opera (1952–1954). Kempe opened the 1951 season at the Vienna State Opera, and appeared at Covent Garden in 1953 (conducting Strauss with enormous success), and later at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955.

He declined to become Covent Garden’s director twice but remained a regular and much-admired conductor at Covent Garden and on the concert platform both in London and on the Continent. He became chief conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1961–1975) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1975 until his untimely death in 1976. In Europe, he became chief conductor of the Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra in 1965 and in 1966, general music director of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

The incredible Herbert von Karajan's cleverness was not bound to the amazing results he had with the Berliner Philarmoniker and Wiener Philarmoniker, which were the greatest orchestras in the world, but also in preparing and performing with other ensembles. His exceptional technical skill and talent connected with his own incredible charisma made him realize achievements which made the audience speechless. In this new IDIS release there is further proof of the incredible Karajan artistic talent: the RAI Rome Symphony Orchestra, conducted and prepared by him, performed as well as the Berliner or Viennese ensembles in this astonishing Beethoven 9th Symphony in D minor, recorded live in Rome in 1954. This live performance is certainly at the top among live performances of the great conductor, and one of the most exciting rendering of Beethoven's masterpiece - here enriched by a vocal cast of exceptional talent.

Essentially, in the incredible ease and naturalness of his pianism, in the unassuming simplicity and absorption of the man, Backhaus was much the same artist and personality then. And he was far from unknown. Even before he won the Rubinstein Prize in 1905, Backhaus was internationally celebrated as a prodigious virtuoso. Backhaus never failed to win a succès d'estime among professional musicians. They always knew his qualities, always marveled at his instrumental perfection, his titanic mastery that scorned every complexity, his unsurpassed freedom and endurance. There was never a time when Backhaus could not toss off any or all of the Chopin études or the Brahms-Paganini variations with an imperturbable calm, an implacable security that left one open-mouthed. Not everyone, for only the pianists really knew what was happening before their eyes and ears, knew how to measure such achievement. There they all sat, in breathless astonishment and envy and despair. Backhaus was a shy, unaffected, recessive personality whose sensational capacities were so unsensationally projected that lay audiences remained totally unconscious of his fabulous accomplishments. (Gerhard Melchert)

Here are two very personal, immediately spontaneous and highly dramatic interpretations of the two concertos, in which so many things sound excitingly new.

For 19th-century audiences Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was the most loved of all his piano concertos, a work in which the balancing of high drama, tenderness, lyricism and humour is most pronounced and in which a coda resolves inner tensions with brilliance and triumphant grandeur. Piano Concerto No. 4 is the most introspective and poetic of the concertos. The simplicity of its opening piano statement gives way to an unprecedented dialogue in the central movement between a heartfelt piano and an austere unison string orchestra, before the infectious energy of the dramatic finale.

REVIEW:

Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto is a departure into a new era. And that’s what Boris Giltburg makes us feel in his interpretation with the Liverpool Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. His first movement is very agitated and rhetorical, and the Largo is not a beautiful romance, but rather a reflection and lingering, a recharging of the batteries, so to speak, whose energy is used up in the last movement. On the whole, the contrasts are highly dramatic. Orchestra and pianist sometimes seem to want to go in directly opposite directions.

Excitement and contrasts between orchestra and piano also characterize the first movement of the Fourth Concerto in which Giltburg makes the cadenza particularly exciting and expressive. The second movement ends enormously sombre and hopeless, the Passagio experience is fearfully depicted. The last movement is jubilant and fluttering, extremely virtuosic and ravishing in its exalted manner.

So we have here two very personal, immediately spontaneous and highly dramatic interpretations of the two concertos, in which so many things sound excitingly new. And that makes us recommend these pianistically and orchestrally magnificent recordings without hesitation.

-- Pizzicato

A young ensemble backed with over 400 years of history is releasing its debut CD with GENUIN – the Dresden Chamber Soloists, are all members of the Sächsische Staatskapelle – one of the most tradition-rich orchestras in the world. The CD proves, however, that for the top musicians, tradition is not merely a matter of maintaining the legacy but of passing the torch. On this CD, the ensemble combines Beethoven's famous Septet (the composer's most successful piece of his lifetime!) with a new work written for the same instrumentation, Simone Fontanelli's gestural Dresden Septet - Hommage to Beethoven. A worthwhile world premiere recording!

Three major additions to the Grøndahl discography, newly recovered from the archives of Danish radio, remastered from the original tapes and released here for the first time. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and the first two movements of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony confirm what an exhilarating interpreter Grøndahl was of the Austro-German classics. A Danish-language version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s neoclassically styled tragi-comedy on the subject of Mozart and Salieri complements a celebrated account of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, given on the occasion of Grøndahl’s belated UK debut in September 1951.

Daniel Weeks is an American Tenor and Artist/Professor. In 2015, he joined the voice faculty of the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, and continues to maintain a performance career encompassing opera, concert, solo recitals, and recordings. Praised for his Italianate voice and sensitive musicianship, Mr. Weeks is also a highly sought-after teacher and master clinician. From 1998-2015, he was a member of the faculty at the University of Louisville. Pianist-composer Gregory Partain has appeared as recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist around the world.

This album of works for flute and piano presents a sequence of 19th-century variations exploring the virtuosic, lyric and popular impulses of the genre. Ignaz Moscheles’ Variations concertantes is a graceful work by one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his time in which both instruments are given equal importance. Richard Strauss’s Introduktion, Thema und Variationen – composed when he was 15 years old – is an example of the young composer’s precocity. Beethoven’s contribution was aimed at the British amateur market with its selection of popular songs, while Theobald Böhm’s arrangements of Schubert Lieder from Winterreise and Schwanengesang reveal some of the composer’s most beautiful and expressive melodies.

The first part of the Douze Toccates by Hans Georg Nägeli was published in Zurich in 1808; there was no second part. On the title page, the composer conceals himself behind an “éditeur” of the same name. Prominent status, on the other hand, is given to the Répertoire des Clavecinistes, a series that ran from 1803 to 1805 in which Nägeli published a total of 15 volumes with works by Clementi, Steibelt, Dussek, Beethoven and others. The choice of “auteurs”, whose works he included in the Répertoire and to whom he dedicated the Toccates, reveals Nägeli’s view of the latest developments in music for the keyboard. Clementi and Beethoven in particular stand out for him as representatives of an era in which “contrapuntal writing is interwoven with artful display by the pianist”, as he writes in the “Announcement” of the Répertoire in the musical press. It is his aim that the Toccates should be understood as an observation on this turning-point in music history. There are therefore good reasons to combine Nägeli’s Toccates with works by Clementi and Beethoven on this release. Nägeli’s pieces enter into a historical context that is an integral part of the Toccates as aesthetic objects, not mere surroundings to them. We hear Nägeli’s pieces in Nägeli’s musical world and Nägeli’s musical world in the pieces. The musical portfolio of Els Biesemans has many aspects to it. After studying piano, organ and chamber music at the Lemmens-Institut in Leuven, Els Biesemans specialized in the varied keyboard styles of the 18th and 19th centuries at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. With a repertoire ranging from medieval music to the modern era, Els Biesemans is the recipient of numerous international awards.

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary, today in Romania, on October 26, 1924, and was hailed as a wunderkind. At the age of seven, she became the last pupil to be taken under the wing of the great violin teacher Jenö Hubay, who had enabled artists like Joseph Szigeti and Sándor Végh to fly high. Ferenc Gabriel continued the girl's training after Hubay's death, helping her to win first prize at the Hubay Competition when she was seventeen. She took up studies at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest the following year and made her orchestral debut with the Tchaikovsky Concerto under the baton of Willem Mengelberg a year later. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Johanna Martzy and her husband Béla Szillery fled via Austria and France to Switzerland. There she won the Concours International d'Exécution Musicale in Geneva in 1947, and her international career gradually gained momentum. She began making gramophone records in 1950; Ferenc Fricsay's recording of the Dvorák concerto for Deutsche Grammophon of 1953 is notable for its rousing intensity and still enjoys benchmark status. In 1954 and 1955 EMI's legendary record producer Walter Legge made the recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin presented here.

In spite of a successful concert comeback in the 1960s, she was no longer in the top flight. It seems symbolical that it was in Budapest that she discovered she had hepatitis in 1969. Johanna Martzy steadily grew weaker and died in Switzerland on August 13, 1979, a year after the death of her husband. The present recordings remain a rare attestation of the brilliance of Johanna Martzy's playing, and it ensures her everlasting fame, at least among connoisseurs.

REVIEW:

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy, who died in Zurich in 1979 at the age of only 54, experienced a short, steep international career at the beginning of the 1950s. She has remained an icon for insiders to this day and is considered the last great representative of the Hungarian violin school.

Profil has now refreshed the majority of their EMI recordings plus two Yellow Label concertos produced in 1952 and 1953 by Mozart (KV 218) under Jochum and the legendary Dvořák concerto under Fricsay and packed them into a 6-CD box set. The EMI bundle includes the two concertos by Brahms (1954) and Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1955) recorded with Paul Kletzki, which are still among the most expressive interpretations of the entire discography, as well as Schubert's (almost) complete works for violin and piano, and then also her legendary Abbey Road recordings of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas.

Martzy embodies the romantic Bach conception of the time, which aims for intensity, expressiveness, and flowing legato, and an aesthetic that wants to overwhelm the listener with beauty and dramatic stringency. At the same time, on her full-bodied, almost viola-like sonorous Bergonzi violin from 1733, she ignites such an inner fervor and draws such arcs of suspense that one cannot evade her infinitely spun, plastic lines. Every single tone is suggestively shaped and part of the flowing universe: drama and logic in one. And with the changing keys it also changes the respective basic color of its tone, i.e. from the darkened sonority of the D minor partita to the radiantly bright E major of the third partita. You can feel the objective and subjective power of this music at every moment: they are monologues of harrowing beauty.

Her interpretations of the concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms and Dvořák, glowing with intensity, shine as flawlessly clean, full-bodied and sonorous and at the same time as inwardly lively, as passionately urgent and lyrically shaped - she practices a kind of musical perfection that everyone Leaving virtuosity behind, proclaimed as a means to penetrate to the true inner, to the glowing human message, to enchant and shake us with pure, flowing heart energy. It's no wonder that Johanna Martzy enjoys iconic status in professional circles and that the few original LPs that have survived are sold at top prices.

-- Rondo (Germany, Attila Csampai)

The repertoire of KLANGKOLLEKTIV WIEN with its conductor Rémy Ballot is focused on a core of famous and lesser-known works of the First Viennese School. This live recording presents the two late String Quartets No. 14 in C-sharp minor Op. 131 and No. 16 in F major Op. 135 by Ludwig van Beethoven in a version for string orchestra. The working title of this concert “Music from a Place of Inner Silence” refers to the fact that Beethoven had presumably completely lost his hearing by the time of composition of these works – he appears to have been turning more and more to an inner, spiritual world. Thus, these two great quartets encompass in their musical substance all possible moods and states of the soul and our being and were not only considered avant-garde at the time, but in many ways pre-shadow the daring of the Second Viennese School and the innovations of the Béla Bartók string quartets. This effect is significantly augmented by the expansion of the ensemble from the original four to 16 musicians.

For his debut GENUIN release, the young pianist Yuxing Chen chooses two great sonatas. He combines Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata and Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, repertoire he also performed at his graduation concert at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre in the summer of 2022. Both sonatas, each a milestone of considerable duration and the highest degree of difficulty, are almost larger than life in every respect. Yuxing Chen makes us forget all that when he interprets the two works of the great composers and pianists with an abundance of naturalness as if stemming from the moment. For him, music is not only an outlet for the most profound emotions – it is the universal and ever-changing language of life.

The eminent Martha Argerich is one of the most loved and admired classical pianists of all time. She quickly gained and maintained world-wide reputation for her exciting performances. This set is the 10th volume of DOREMI’s special series of live performances and broadcasts featuring the artistry of the young Martha Argerich. Most items included are first release! Included in this volume is the first release ever of Martha Argerich’s only known recording of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata.