Includes cto(s) by Robert Schumann. Soloist: Claudio Arrau.
Includes cto(s) for pno by Franz Liszt. Soloist: Claudio Arrau.
Includes work(s) for pno by Carl Maria von Weber. Soloist: Claudio Arrau.

By now nearly all of the Stokowski/Philadelphia recordings made for Victor in the past fifteen years of the the electrical era have appeared on compact discs from various sources; the present set, spanning the years 1927-1940, fills the last remaining gaps, bringing to CD the last of those that have not been revived in this format until now. Transfer wizard Nark Obert-Thorn has restored the contents of this set from the best possible sources. *Not for sale in the US*

Raul Koczalski (3 January 1884, Warsaw – 24 November 1948, Poznań) was a Polish pianist who studied with Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli and became an acclaimed Chopin interpreter of the first half of the 20th century. Koczalski's command resulted not only from his mother-tongue mastery of precisely those elements of Chopin's pianism that people most often tried to describe (yet found most elusive to master themselves), but from his understanding of musical styles and genres as Chopin understood them. In this idiomatic mode, melody is played in the cantabile style, which means not only with a lovely singing tone but also with a nineteenth-century singer's soloistic rubato, a particular kind of relationship to the accompaniment, and an operatic force of interpretation. Dance rhythms dance, even (especially) when they rush and linger, when this beat or the other is agogically accented, or when the rhythmic flow is suspended for a phantasmagoric flight or a momentary virtuosic display.

"Two visceral performances of late Bruckner as directed by Hans Knappertsbusch, a major exponent of the 'old school' of Bruckner interpretation... Knappertsbusch revered the C Minor Symphony of Bruckner and bequeathed us five inscriptions. This Vienna Philharmonic concert (29 October 1961), Kna's last with the VPO... resonates with introspective girth and massive distribution of acoustical sonority." -Gary Lemco in Audiophile Audition

This Beethoven 9th was originally released by Music & Arts on MACD292 in 1986 and was newly remastered in 2006; the 8th, taken from the same concert, has not previously appeared. Critic Henry Fogel wrote of the original issue of the 9th in Fanfare: 'The Concertgebouw plays if possessed, the chorus sings in the same manner, and one listens to this performance feeling the impact of great music being performed with the deepest of emotional and intellectual conviction'.

This disc completes John Khouri's survey of Hummel's later piano works begun with his earlier disc of the two greatest piano sonatas on MACD1103. The present recording includes the 24 Etudes published in 1833 and is followed by the 3 Amusements from 1824 and 2 substantial Rondos - those in B minor, 1825 and C major from 1831 in first recordings on early pianos.

Includes work(s) by Jenö Hubay. Soloist: Charles Castleman.

A phenomenal technician and colourist who made melody communicate to a unique degree and played with great stylistic differentiation, Walter Gieseking was one of the most individual and consistently inspired pianists of our time. Although his commercial recordings encompass some of the great recordings ever made, he didn't live to record under ideal circumstances even a small part of his vast repertoire. The present disc of broadcast performances is therefore of special importance not only in increasing the Gieseking legacy but in chronicling the history of great pianism. The Concerto K488 and Sonata K545 appear on CD for the first time in this collection, while the Concerto K467 and the Sonata K576 are issued here in considerably improved sound over prior editions.

Classical Music

"People loved him because of his good nature, even if they did not understand his art." Thus wrote Sibylla, Duchess of Württemberg, Froberger's last patron and his "humble forsaken pupil". She places a finger squarely on two fundamental aspects of Froberger's life: his modest and unostentatious character and the extreme subtlety of his music. A pupil of Frescobaldi and exponent of Couperin, Froberger's complete works remained unpublished until 1897 and it is only in the last half-century that more and more keyboard players have started to feel the persuasion of his secret and inward music. The present recording explores some of the music in the earliest of the three surviving Froberger autographs housed in the Austrian National Library, the Libro Secondo of 1649. Colin Tilney is internationally known for his harpsichord, clavichord and fortepiano playing, with many solo recordings on DG (Archive), EMI Electrola, Decca, Hyperion, Dorian, etc. For Music &Arts he earlier recorded Bach's English Suites on an antique Italian harpsichord, the French Suites on clavichord, an album of fugues by Bach and his forerunners, and a Scarlatti disc.

Connoisseurs of historical performances will certainly know the famous photograph taken at a reception in Berlin in 1929, showing conductors Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Kleiber was the youngest of these esteemed maestros, and today remains perhaps the least known of them. This situation is doubtless due in part to the fact that of the five, he by far had the smallest recorded legacy and certainly the fewest appearances in the US. These circumstances should not however, lead us to underestimate Kleiber, who in 1923, became the youngest Generalmusikdirector in Germany, at that country's premiere opera house, the Berlin Staatsoper. He had a falling out with Nazi leaders and left Berlin in 1935, becoming a wanderer and guesting at various European venues. He settled with his family in Chile in 1940, conducting mainly at the Teatro Colon during the war, as well as in Havana. When hostilities ended, he did not immediately return to Europe as might be expected. He did however, accept an invitation to lead the NBC Symphony in four concerts in February-March 1946. Toscanini appreciated his music making and Kleiber was invited back for another quartet of concerts presented in this CD set, which contains a broad cross-section of his symphonic repertory favorites.

Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and are almost all intended for the harpsichord. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys. Only a small fraction of Scarlatti's compositions were published during his lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 30 Essercizi ('Exercises'). These were rapturously received throughout Europe, and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Dr. Charles Burney. The many sonatas which were unpublished during Scarlatti's lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the two and a half centuries since. Scarlatti has, however, attracted notable admirers, including Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Heinrich Schenker, Vladimir Horowitz and Marc-André Hamelin. The Russian school of pianism has particularly championed the sonatas. Frédéric Chopin, as a piano teacher, notably wrote: 'Those of my dear colleagues who teach the piano are unhappy that I make my own pupils work on Scarlatti. But I am surprised that they are so blinkered. His music contains finger-exercises aplenty and more than a touch of the most elevated spirituality... I maintain that the day will come when Scarlatti's music will often be played at concerts and that audiences will appreciate and enjoy it'. [Courtesy of Wikipedia]. There has never been a complete recording of all Scarlatti sonatas played on the piano, although Naxos currently has such a project underway, in which each CD is allocated to a different performer. The Music & Arts project will be the only complete edition played on the piano by a single performer.

The German-born, Anglicized composer, instrument builder, and publisher J.B. Cramer was an outstanding representative of the London Piano School. In the late 18th-century and 1s half of the 19th, two schools of piano playing came to prominence. One is the so-called Viennese school and the other the school of Field (so described by Friedrich Wieck). This school might more accurately be called the school of piano playing based in London which was founded by J.C. Bach and Muzio Clementi. These and succeeding pianists admired the English grand pianoforte and used it whenever possible. Now badly neglected, Cramer wrote keyboard sonatas of outstanding merit, the best of which are resurrected in this collection. Curiously, for the last 31 years of his life, Cramer stopped composing in this genre. Why? One reason is that the sonata as a form had become unfashionable in England during this period, most pianists writing for the more popular market. Another reason Cramer's whole output declined after 1830 may be that he felt completely out of sympathy with the new pianos, with the new style of composition and with the new pianists. Although he knew many of the new pianistic stars, he found little sympathy for their music and playing styles. He was firmly committed to the pre-1835 Broadwood grand, with its leather hammers, triple stringing and wooden frame. The new school of piano playing alienated him and in turn he became a relic of the past, respected to his face but privately scorned. Out of sync with the prevailing musical climate, there as no demand for his serious works and he simply stopped producing them. These last sonatas then, represent a final flowering of his compositional talent coinciding with the final phase of the early Broadwood grand piano. The performer's previous fortepiano recordings of works by Beethoven, Weber, Clementi and Dussek have been favourably reviewed in Gramophone, Fanfare, Musica, and other trade journals.

BUZZ: There was a time--specifically, the middle years of the 20th century--when the music in this recital used commonly to be played in a somewhat prettified, Dresden-china fashion. Nothing could be more different than Claudio Arrau's approach to Mozart even in the relatively early stages of his career (and he was sixty-one when these live performances were given). Certainly, some other pianists in those days gave full value to the dramatic power of the minor-key sonatas, K. 310 and K. 457, though very few approached the sheer volcanic force he brought to those bass octaves in the A-minor's finale. But you encounter Arrau's no-holds-barred style even in seemingly less serious works: the finale of K. 283, for example, already sounds, under his hands, more unpredictably Beethovenish than in the interpretations of some of his contemporaries; and in the relatively relaxed finale of K. 570, he punches out the insistent staccato repeated notes of the contrasting central episode with positively demonic relish. This, then, is in an important sense "bigger" Mozart playing than was the norm 50 years ago. At the same time, the clarity of Arrau's texture and the often airy lightness of his pedaling keeps his view of the music from transgressing 18th-century stylistic norms. And while his reputation is based to a degree on his notably classical restraint, you will find in these performances any number of moments when the wit of his timing creates a delightfully mischievous effect. Baldwin piano. Restoration engineer: Gene Gaudette. Premiere CD release! Issued with the kind permission of the Arrau Estate. AAD stereo Total Time:100 min.

There have been few pianists of Arrau's range and stature, and these invaluable live recordings can only reaffirm memories of another time, another place, where sheer musical calibre and quality counted above all. Audio restoration: Lani Spahr; Notes: Bryce Morrison. All previously unissued; released by permission of the Arrau Estate. TT: 3 hrs 39 min 14 sec. UPC # 0-17685 1263-1 (3CDs)