“The complete violinist” Benjamin Schmid inspires both audiences and international critics in the field of jazz and improvisation. For his latest album “Jazz Violin Concertos” with the Swedish chamber orchestra Musica Vitae; Schmid presents jazz violin concertos written by Austrian composers. Friedrich Gulda’s Violin Concerto entitled “Wings” is conceived as a single large violin cadenza with orchestra; which lacks not only virtuoso but also groovy parts. Herbert Berger’s “Metropoles Suite” was adapted for violin by the composer for Benjamin Schmid; each of the movements “Insomnia”; “El largo adios”; “A la minute” and “Avenida” can be assigned to a metropolis. “Three Songs for an Abandonend Angel” by the Austrian jazz pianist and composer Sabina Hank was also written for Schmid.

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.

Friedrich Gulda was born in Vienna on May 16, 1930. He began his musical education at the Grossmann Conservatory and subsequently took private lessons from Felix Pazofsky. From 1942 to 1947 he studied piano at the Vienna Academy of Music under Bruno Seidlhofer and Music Theory and Composition under Joseph Marx. He gave his first public performance in 1944 and, two years later when just 16 years old, won the Geneva International Music Competition. Starting after the Second World War, as a 20-year-old, Gulda established himself as a piano soloist with an excellent international reputation and even performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1950. In the 1950s he was celebrated and considered the leading interpreter of Beethoven in his generation. He founded his own Klassische Orchester Gulda for chamber music with members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to Beethoven, Gulda’s repertoire encompasses works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss, whose Burleske in D minor and lieder are included in this release, with Gulda accompanying soprano Hilde Güden. Gulda was essentially an out-and-out contrarian who showed that a great genius can sometimes be only a step away from a certain madness. While Karl Böhm or Rubinstein admired him as a magnificently talented interpreter of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Gulda could also be provocative – including inciting his fellow concert pianists. Asked about Vladimir Horowitz, Gulda once responded: “Horowitz is a master. Because he is able to do – whatever he wants,” but also added: “But what he is after doesn’t interest me” (Joachim Kaiser).

REVIEW:
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) was certainly never a conformist pianist. But he was less flamboyant in his youth than in his later years, and he did present new perspectives at the beginning of his career, which helped to provoke a change in thinking. The recordings in this CD box set date from this period.

He recorded the freshly perky Mozart Sonata K. 576 in 1948, and both Concertos K. 503 and 537 in 1955 with the New Symphony Orchestra under Anthony Collins. Gulda’s fresh yet nuanced playing compensates for the weak orchestra’s playing. The Beethoven sonatas Nos. 4, 7, 8 and 19 show the still searching Gulda of 1955 on his way to the 1967 complete recording. The 3rd CD includes the concerto piece by Carl Maria von Weber and the Strauss Burlesque, as well as a set of Strauss songs that Gulda recorded with Hilde Güden in 1956. These are wonderful interpretations of rare freshness and suppleness. Güden’s silvery timbre and her confidently controlled, light vocal line coupled with Gulda’s spontaneous and sensitive playing make for an uncommonly natural performance.

Recorded in 1954, Chopin’s compositions, the 4 Ballades and the 1st Piano Concerto, are among Gulda’s ‘immortal’ recordings. In the 1st Piano Concerto, Gulda collaborates with the more traditional Adrian Boult, but it is precisely the contrast in temperament that leads to special tension and dynamics. This recording has been available several times on various labels, but here it definitely sounds in the best quality so far. Also very exciting are the four ballads, which he plays dramatically and narratively.

Debussy and Ravel, the composers represented on CDs Nos. 5 and 6 of this box, have been Gulda’s recurring preoccupation. The early recordings from 1953 and 1955 may not yet be as stylistically tested on the hard, sharp and pithy of jazz as the late recordings, but their analytically modern style, with clear, precise lines and contours and good transparency, shows the intellectual brilliance of these interpretations.

The bottom line is that this encounter with the young Gulda is a very important one that should help one understand the older musician and could help bring respect to Gulda among those who did not appreciate his later work as much.

-- Pizzicato

The very first audition brought Oliver Mascarenhas to the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover in 1997. This was followed by a busy concert schedule, radio and television productions, and successes at international competitions. On his first album production, Oliver Mascarenhas presents himself as a highly virtuoso interpreter of the cello concerto by Friedrich Gulda as well as three pieces by the Russian jazz composer Nikolai Kapustin, who died in July 2020. As grandiose bonus tracks we hear Gulda with four jazz standards, recorded in 1958 at the NDR. On bass none other than the young Hans alias James Last.

Gulda, a brilliant master of rhythm, uncompromising Bach interpreter and jazz musician, is in the best keeping with Chopin. Works by Chopin appear in Gulda’s concert programmes from quite early on. His secret in playing Chopin with so much vitality? It is the inimitable mix of rhythmic strictness, most cantabile tenderness and controlled outbursts of emotion. Although he would become one of 20th-century music’s most capricious rebels — as in love with the free spirits of jazz as with the living monuments of classical — pianist Friedrich Gulda (1930–2000) was born and bred in that most traditional of musical cities, Vienna. He studied theory with the late-Romanticist Joseph Marx at the Vienna Academy of Music, and he won the Geneva International Pianists' Competition at age sixteen, eventually earning a reputation for the rare blend of cogency and freedom within his interpretations of music from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Ravel and Debussy. His most notable recordings included both books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and the complete sonatas and concertos of Beethoven.

Gulda's “Symphony in G“, presented on this album, was discovered in the SWR archive in the course of research for the release of all the recordings the Austrian pianist made for the German Southwest Broadcasting Corporation (SWR). Until now nobody actually knew that this work existed for there are no indications of Gulda being commissioned or of a specific occasion for which he might have composed this symphony. Therefore, one listens here to the world première of a piece which – apart from being recorded in the studio on 20 November 1970 – has never been performed in public. At the beginning of the 1970s Gulda gave concerts that exclusively featured his own compositions. This also applies to his performance at the Heidelberger Jazztage in 1971, released here for the first time digitally and on album. Almost all of Gulda's jazz works, though often based on classical forms, cannot be played without knowledge of improvisation so as to “keep them away from bunglers” (as the pianist himself put it). One of Gulda’s few compositions without improvisation to be heard here is No. IV from the ten-part piano cycle “Play Piano Play”. “Prelude and Fugue" was probably Gulda’s favourite work and was the last piece of Gulda’s performance in Heidelberg. An exception on this album is Fritz Pauer's "Etude.” In 1966 Fritz Pauer won a prize in the jazz competition Gulda had initiated and so Gulda decided to include this work in the Heidelberg concert from 1971.

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich 40 years ago, few would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player in the classical music market. One of the label’s priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and, since the mid 1980s, the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory for discovering and nurturing young artists. This Legendary Pianists 10-disc boxed set continues the series marking ORFEO’s 40th anniversary and features nine pianists in historical and modern recordings dating from the 1950s to the 2000s.

REVIEW:

This edition should be quite intriguing to collectors who surely will find a set of names quite different from what they might have chosen. It does not claim to be definitive; a collection, not the collection. There are ten CDs in the box featuring nine artists recorded live or recorded for broadcast, giving a sense of hearing an actual performance that contributes a heightened sense of you-are-there. Repertoire consists of mainly concertos from Bach to Brahms, via Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Also, a handful of variations, etc. This is a most attractive collection of pure pleasure.

-- The Whole Note

But for Kempff at his most unbridled you need to hear 1956 WDR Cologne radio recordings of Beethoven’s Op 111 and Schumann’s Fantasie, where bass chords are augmented and the sense of uplift is so acute that you could as well be listening to Schnabel, Cortot, or Fischer live. The disc is one of 10 in Orfeo’s Legendary Pianists, which opens with the player Furtwängler described as ‘the troubadour of the piano’, Géza Anda, who fits that description like a glove in Beethoven’s First Concerto recorded in Munich under Rafael Kubelík, whereas Brahms’s Second Concerto with the same artists fans the flames with consistent intensity, the second movement especially. In the same collection, Gulda plays concertos by Beethoven and Schumann, a rather brittle-sounding Oleg Maisenberg is compelling in Schubert (including the Wanderer Fantasy), Konstantin Lifschitz brings a Gouldian tautness to the seven Bach keyboard concertos (greatly extending the cadenza in BWV1052’s finale), Carl Seemann is characteristically considered in Mozart’s Concertos K449 and 503, Gerhard Oppitz plays Brahms’s Third Sonata (the second movement being significantly broader than on his RCA recording) and we’re given the Third and Fifth Beethoven Concertos from the cycle that Rudolf Serkin and Kubelík recorded in 1977, a much-underrated set.

-- Gramophone

REVIEW:

MOZART Symphonies: No. 25; No. 40. Piano Concerto No. 14 • Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond; Friedrich Gulda (pn); Concertgebouw O • ORFEO 795 091, mono (69:37) Live: Salzberg 7/2/1958

This concert places the E? Piano Concerto (K 449) between the two G-Minor Symphonies (K 183 and K 550), resulting in an artfully constructed Mozart program. For a monaural recording, the sound quality is good, although a bit damped. Audience noise is not present except between movements and as applause at the end of each work.

Sawallisch’s beat is strong throughout, and orchestral clarity is good enough to allow part-writing transparency. Tempos are generally rapid, so that nothing ever drags. The opening movement tempo of K 550, however, could use a little braking. Exposition repeats are observed in the first and last movements of K 183 and in the first movement of K 550. The last movement of K 550, however, is played without repeats, and this leaves impressions of imbalance and unfinished business. Obviously, the conductor thought otherwise, and I bow to his judgment.

Friedrich Gulda at 28 and Wolfgang Sawallisch at 35 were, in 1958, among the most promising young pianists and conductors of the time. This account of Mozart’s Concerto No. 14 is a living example of that promise. The conductor reached great heights in the coming years, eventually being named conductor laureate of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The pianist was a maverick with a penchant for challenging the musical establishment and daring to display a strong interest in jazz. He eventually faded as a performer who was once sought-after by the more traditional concertgoers. His death in 2000 at age 69 revived interest in his early recordings. In the Piano Concerto, this disc offers a snapshot of promise of two artists in vintage Mozart. Twenty years earlier in a studio recording, 35-year-old Rudolf Serkin and conductor Adolf Busch and the Adolf Busch Chamber Players offered this Concerto in a different, more quickly paced style, but still as vintage Mozart. In both performances, there is no tempo tampering, no dynamics distortion, and no excesses of expression—there is just beautiful Mozart expressed by beautiful phrase shaping. The closest to these standards in a modern recording is Murray Perahia’s with the English Chamber Orchestra. Perahia’s tempos are closer to Serkin’s than to Gulda’s in the first movement, but closer to Gulda’s than to Serkin’s in the last movement. Where Serkin and Perahia perform with chamber orchestras, Gulda performs with a full, but suitably reduced, orchestra that Sawallisch never allows to overpower either the music or the piano sound.

This is a memorable Salzberg Festival program from which one comes away with a deeper understanding of Mozart. This is a very good disc to have.

FANFARE: Burton Rothleder