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.
For the ninth installment in haenssler CLASSIC's new budget series "Premium Composers", we've assembled a collection of Beethoven's most beautiful and popular piano sonatas. Included is the timeless "Moonlight" Sonata, the "Pathetique" and the witty "Les Adieux". This collection is an exceptional value, making available selections from Gerhard Oppitz's critically acclaimed complete edition at a budget price for the very first time.
When the ORFEO label was established in Munich forty years ago, surely no one with the music scene back then would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player on the classical music market. One of the label’s main 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 by discovering and nurturing young artist. This “ORFEO 40th Anniversary” 2-album sampler well reflects these two sides of the label by combining highlight tracks of historical recordings with today’s global stars.
At the time he wrote Enoch Arden, Strauss was known primarily as a composer of tone poems, having made a name for himself with works such as Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Til Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The brilliantly orchestrated symphonic work From Italy was written at about the same time as Enoch Arden. It took Strauss a while to develop a reputation as an operatic composer: his opera Guntram was a critical failure. Of his 16 operas, Salome was the first to achieve any kind of fame, albeit of a rather scandalous and even infamous nature. Pianists have often deplored the fact that the gifted painter of orchestra colour wrote so little music for their instrument. Apart from the early Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 5, the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 3, the Funf Stimmungsbilder, Op. 9, and Theme, 15 Improvisations and Fugue, there are only the highly demanding piano accompaniments for the lieder and, of course, the piano part in Enoch Arden. Despite its rarity, the 50-minute work in two parts has remained more or less at the fringes of mainstream repertoire. Yet no less than the eccentric Canadian musician and Bach specialist Glenn Gould recorded it, although it ''clearly contains some of the most sentimentally unbearable music that Strauss ever wrote''.
During his short and turbulent life, Robert Schumann often composed as if in a trance. This exuberance, this impulsivity is particularly apparent in his works for piano and orchestra, all closely connected to his love for Clara Wieck. - "A cross between symphony, concerto and great sonata, not a concerto for the virtuoso" was his aim - and this is brilliantly realized; however, these works require a virtuoso with nimble, as well as strong and sensitive fingers, a pianist able to recreate Schumann's unique romantic world. Gerhard Oppitz achieves this in exemplary fashion, flawlessly mastering the technical demands in an interpretation imbued with a very personal passion for one of our greatest composers - all the while supported by and in dialogue with an orchestra ideally suited to his vision: The Bamberger Symphoniker.
Gerhard Oppitz is recognized as being one of the top pianists performing internationally today. His series of Schubert’s piano works, based on his long experience with the works, showcases his superior technical control, deep intellectual pervasion, and sweeping musical realization. This ninth installment includes dances, marches, and sonata fragments.
Robert Schumann's piano music, which Gerhard Oppitz now presents for the third time in a specific configuration of works, displays a special characteristic in contrast to the piano writing of the major 19th-century Romantic piano composers Alkan, Chopin and Liszt. The attempt to categorize his works either as contributions to the Classical models of sonata and variation, or to the Romantic genres of Etude, Ballade, Scherzo and a wealth of dance and character pieces, proved unsatisfactory; that remains the case even though Schumann himself was a regular contributor to the two forms handed down from the Classical era. Schumann himself, then, was engaged in the creative questioning of hitherto valid compositional and musical ideals.
Gerhard Oppitz plays Robert Schumann Piano Works, Vol. 2 In the second part of his Schumann cycle, Gerhard Oppitz combines four works composed in the second half of the "piano decade" from 1830 to 1840 with two from the beginning and end of Schumann's piano music period: on the one hand Carnaval op. 9 (1837), Piano Sonata no. 1 op. 11 (1836), Kinderszenen op. 15 (1839) and the Drei Romanzen op. 28 (1840), and on the other Schumann's Papillons op. 2 published in 1832 and the Drei Fantasiestucke op. 111 published in 1852.
Within the realm of Romantic piano music, where new discoveries are constantly just around the corner, the contribution of Robert Schumann has always played a major part. True, he cannot rival the aura of Chopin’s works, of which Ignaz Friedman asserted that not only had Chopin opened the piano with them, he had closed it again. (Schumann paid his own tribute in his reverent review of Chopin’s op. 2 of 1831, the Variations on Mozart’s “Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben”). Nor did Schumann embed in the history of piano playing such milestones of technical mastery and manual dexterity as Liszt who – inspired by Paganini’s concerts and enabled by the double-escapement action developed by Sébastien Erard in 1821 – had practically reinvented the instrument by the time he wrote his Etudes d’exécution transcendante in 1837. And neither the sprightliness of Felix Mendelssohn’s keyboard idiom nor Charles-Valentin Alkan’s exaltation of virtuosity are characteristic of Schumann’s piano music, even if he proves in his Abegg Variations op. 1 (1830) and his Toccata op. 7 (1832) that he brilliantly commanded both approaches to the instrument.
