A New Yorker review about Rudolf Serkin from 2017 states: “his performances… reflect his sense of titanic struggle to realize the ideas and emotions that he found in the words that he played. He bypassed the surface sheen of ingratiating sounds to render the beauty of that struggle; his piano tone is itself the sound of struggle filled with the meeting of metal and wood and evoking spiritual exaltation through physical and intellectual exertion.”

Rudolf Serkin was born in 1903 in Bohemia. His musical gifts emerged early, and he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic at 12. His European career extended throughout the 20s and 30s. He first played in the United States in 1933, and three years later appeared with the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini, eventually performing with them over 100 times. Rudolf Serkin became one of the most admired pianists of the 20th century. He performed and recorded extensively with the top international orchestras and conductors. This release contains first releases of live performances of Four Mozart’s piano concertos.

These Bavarian Radio recordings, first released in 2005, constitute Rudolf Serkin's third and final edition of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos, and were the only performances to be recorded in the concert hall, not in the studio. As such, they fittingly complete both his discography and his artistic legacy as one of the 20th century’s indisputably great pianists. This jewel case presentation, complete with booklet notes in German and English, is a re-release of the original 3-album box set that went out of stock following healthy sales.

REVIEWS:

For at least a half century Beethoven’s piano concertos played a central role in Rudolf Serkin’s repertoire. Yet out of all the Serkin Beethoven concerto cycles on disc, the present one, recorded over the course of three concerts in October and November of 1977, offers the most consistent artistic and sonic satisfaction.

The slightly distant yet attractively robust engineering conveys a cogent sense of concert hall-realism, and not just to the benefit of Rafael Kubelik’s superb Bavarian musicians. It also reveals Serkin’s elusive, difficult-to-record sonority in more flattering, three-dimensional light than the gaunt, often monochrome impression one gleans from his Columbia Masterworks sessions. As a result, the concentration and inner tension Serkin brings to the slow movements comes off with more warmth and sustaining power.

Although Serkin at 74 may not have been the impetuous, fiery virtuoso in the first three concertos’ finales that he was in his 40s, when he recorded them for CBS Masterworks, his technique nevertheless is still assured, alert, and responsive, and far more energized than in his relatively careful and labored collaborations with Ozawa.

However, Serkin must have drunk from the fountain of youth before hitting the stage for the Choral Fantasy (Kubelik, too, for that matter). The performance radiates inspiration from start to finish, highlighted by Serkin’s ardent yet cannily structured opening cadenza, the chamber episodes’ zestful give and take, plus massed choral and orchestral tuttis that at once communicate elemental power and textural clarity. Let’s hope this major addition to Serkin’s discography will encourage Sony not to leave its own complete Serkin edition hanging.

For all fans of the pianist and/or the conductor, this release is a must.

--ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

This recording of Serkin from 1977 highlights a 20th-century great who brought musical purpose and intellectual rigour to every detail. Serkin ranks among the greatest of 20th-century pianists; his repertoire ranged from Bach to Reger, but Beethoven was always at its very heart. In the autumn of 1977, in the Herkulessaal in Munich, he played all five Beethoven concertos as well as the Choral Fantasy in a series of concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík, another musician who, like Serkin, always put himself at the service of the music. Recordings of those performances were first released on disc in 2005...their reissue now makes available again what is in every respect a historic musical document.

Serkin was never interested in ingratiating himself through honeyed phrases or silken tone. Instead in these interpretations there is musical purpose and intellectual rigor in every detail. Whether it’s the almost combative muscularity he brings to the piano’s first entry in the third concerto, or the instant authority of his torrential opening to the Emperor, it sets the tone for all that follows, constantly drawing equally intense responses from Kubelík and his superb orchestra. The accounts of the slow movements are just as remarkable; there’s a hymn-like calm to the Largo of the third, a consoling sweetness to the fourth’s exchanges between the soloist and the orchestra. All are in short, remarkable performances, not only among the finest available on disc, but further reminders of just how peerless a Beethoven interpreter Serkin was.

--The Guardian (Andrew Clements)

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

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.

The 4-album Richard Strauss set gathers together all of their early 1960s recordings of the famous tone poems along with Salome’s Dance, the Rosenkavalier and Bürger als Edelmann suites, the Burleske with soloist Rudolf Serkin and the First Horn Concerto, featuring Philadelphia principal Mason Jones. An early review in High Fidelity best summed up their powerful appeal in Strauss’s music: “There is no doubt that, for sheer gorgeousness, the Philadelphians have no peers.” More recent assessments in the Penguin Guide reaffirm that verdict: “Virtuoso orchestral playing … and many felicities of characterization” [Also sprach Zarathustra]; “Marvelous orchestral playing and the two soloists play splendidly with plenty of character” [Don Quixote]; “An extraordinarily voluptuous Philadelphia performance … Ormandy directs with licentious abandon, and the orchestra responds with tremendous virtuosity and ardor” [Salome’s Dance]; “Ormandy’s Ein Heldenleben is an engulfing performance, and the composite richness of tone and the fervor of the playing … bring the highest possible level of orchestral tension.”

Sony Classical proudly announces an uncommonly attractive new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest installment of the popular series showcases the reissue of a path-breaking composer edition as well as recordings by some of the labels’ greatest artists of the last half-century.

Rudolf Serkin is rightly revered for his powerful interpretations of the Austro-German Classical and Romantic piano repertoire, but he was also an outstanding Bach player. In the 1920s he began a decades-long partnership with the great German violinist-conductor Adolf Busch (his future father-in-law) that led to, among countless treasures, a classic set of the Brandenburg Concertos, recorded in London in 1935, and many performances of the Bach Violin Sonatas, including a live recording of No. 3 in E major, BWV 1016, made in Washington in 1943. That performance is now being reissued in a new Sony Classical release containing all of Serkin’s Bach for American Columbia. The new collection contains another famous recording of the Brandenburgs featuring Rudolf Serkin’s magnificent continuo playing on piano (and his son Peter playing harpsichord continuo in No. 6), made in 1965 at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont (founded by Adolf Busch), led by Alexander Schneider and conducted by Pablo Casals. There are also performances of Bach’s two Concertos for 3 Keyboards that Serkin recorded at Marlboro and Casals’s Prades Festival with pianist-colleagues Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Peter Serkin and Ruth Laredo; Serkin père playing solo works including the Chromatic Fantasy and Italian Concerto; and the 14 canons based on the Aria from the Goldberg Variations that was discovered in 1974 in Bach’s own copy of the printed works, with Serkin’s “concentrated, reflective, crystal-clear, and beautifully balanced performance” (Andrew Porter, writing in High Fidelity) of the Aria.

Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991) was one of the great Beethoven exponents of the 20th century. Donal Henahan wrote of a performance given by Serkin of the 'Diabelli' in the NY Times: 'Rudolk Serkin's...approach to music and his instrument is devout, all but priestly, and his audience attends to him with the seriousness of a congregation that expects nothing less than high revelation.'