These legendary recordings of Alicia de Larrocha performing Mozart and Beethoven have been digitally remastered from the Original SWR tapes. The Mozart was performed with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester under the direction of Garcia Navarro. The original performance in 1986 proved Larrocha’s intimate relationship with the works of Mozart.; The Beethoven recording was made in 1977 when Larrocha was 54 years old. She performs the work with aplomb, alongside the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, under the direction of Ernest Bour.

Sir Colin Davis’ sensitivity is effortlessly mirrored by Larrocha with her enviable ease, her avoidance of all artifice or attention-seeking dalliance. Few other pianists are more attuned to Mozart’s mix of pain and radiance.

Alicia de Larrocha’s and Sir Colin Davis’s Mozart concerto cycle, while rarely less than distinguished, grows in stature with each new issue. Indeed, so musicianly and distilled are both these performances that the casual listener is in danger of taking them for granted, mistaking their classic sobriety for monotony and their devotion for a monochrome quality.

Sir Colin’s unforced way with the opening tutti of K595, his awareness of “all passion spent” is haunting but unobtrusive. Such sensitivity is effortlessly mirrored by Larrocha with her enviable ease, her avoidance of all artifice or attention-seeking dalliance. Few other pianists are more attuned to Mozart’s mix of pain and radiance, of the subtle major-minor shifts commencing at 6'34'' and, throughout, her economy ensures that every passing mood is unmistakably yet unobtrusively registered. Again, tempos are ideal whether in K595’s gently paced final Allegro (less idiosyncratically slow or autumnal than from Kempff on DG) or in the central Allegretto of K459. Even in the finale’s opera buffa high-jinks she captures the music’s undertow, a poise and equanimity like “the still point of the turning world”.

Balance and sound (grainy but apt) are exemplary, and this issue is graced with a fine portrait of the pianist by Christian Steiner.'

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [12/1997]

Alicia de Larrocha's Beethoven is 'central' in the most constructive sense of that term—in other words, moderately paced, warm-hearted, cleanfingered and free of attention-seeking mannerisms. Tilson Thomas reflects her comparatively romantic bias—this isn't quite the superfine Beethoven of his ECO symphony cycle—and has the LSO support her with poise and propriety. The Sonata is equally composed, though here de Larrocha traces some interesting contrapuntal detail (at the beginning of the Andante, for example).

-- Gramophone [12/1993]
reviewing these performances included as part of RCA 61675