Beethoven Piano Your resource for the piano music of Ludwig van Beethoven

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Here's an inspired appendage to the Aimard-Harnoncourt set of the Beethoven Piano Concertos. When new, the Triple Concerto, combining three solo instruments with orchestra, was considered a bold new type of concerto. That's how it's played here. The solo trio blends nicely with the orchestra, giving the work a chamber music dimension. Once past the slow introduction, Harnoncourt conducts a vigorous, almost rhapsodic performance, with great forward momentum. But the honors go to the outstanding soloists. Aimard etches the piano line with exceptional clarity, Hagen, the cellist of the Hagen Quartet, plays with gorgeous tone, while violinist Zehetmair, who also leads a quartet bearing his name, almost steals the show through his agile playing and phrasing that cuts to the heart of the music. I know of no better performance of this work. The Choral Fantasy too comes off as more than a weird combination of a solo piano fantasia and a choral sketch for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. And pianist and orchestra play the daylights out of the quirky Rondo in B-flat major. --Dan Davis

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First Time on CD. Digitally Remastered.

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A wizard of technical control since his prodigy days, Kissin simply uses this as a foundation to probe the depths of such core repertory items as the ones on this collection. It takes a truly subtle musicality and grasp to make the endlessly recorded Moonlight sound fresh, but Kissin has the goods, pulling the carpet from underneath and making you really notice, with his unsentimental, steady tempo, how unsettling Beethoven's harmonic fluctuations are in a first movement of startling inwardness. Kissin allows the middle minuet to blossom within the sonata's larger nightscape, while he pushes the finale's cri de coeur to its heaven-storming edge. He likewise traces the late-19th-century gothic labyrinth of Franck's Prelude, Choral et Fugue with an absorbing blend of delicacy and power. But the real highlight of this disc is the gloriously brilliant intensity Kissin brings to the Brahms Paganini Variations. Listen to how he parades a dizzying, dazzling series of moods--from caressing introspection and bone-crunching, steely chords to the giddy cross-rhythms of Book II, Variation 7--to match Brahms's magnitude of invention. This is pianism of the first order. --Thomas May

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This disc presents one of the 20th century's greatest and most distinctive pianists in music of two pianist-composers, Schumann and Beethoven, who were among his most treasured specialties. The playing is fluent, brilliant without ever being flashy, and phrased and accented with a totally unique flavor. Kempff has power to spare, but he uses it with a restraint that heightens its impact. Kempff's style is an attractive blend of intelligence and lyric grace; he is, like Alfred Brendel. a thinking man's pianist, but his joyful plunge into the lighter moments is as significant as his subtle explorations of the music's depths. In this collection, taken from television broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970, Schumann is presented essentially as a brilliant miniaturist, Beethoven as a devotee of larger and deeper forms. Kempff takes the measure of both styles. A bonus presents a less-known but fine pianist, Dino Ciani, in Schumann's Novelette, Op. 21, No. 1 and two numbers from Bartok's "Out of Doors" Suite. --Joe McLellan

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Sviatoslav Richter was devoted to Beethoven and kept nearly two dozen of the composer's 32 sonatas in his active repertory. But some sonatas--such as No. 3 in C Major (Opus 2, No. 3), No. 7 in D Major (Opus 10, No. 3), and No. 32 in C Minor (Opus 111)--turned up on Richter programs decade after decade, while others appeared for a season or so never to return. Richter's relationship to Sonata No. 29 in B-flat (Hammerklavier) belongs to the latter category. He performed it all over Europe in the spring and summer of 1975 and seems never to have programmed it again. One wonders why. Richter was designed by God to perform the Hammerklavier. He had the huge hands necessary for its reckless leaps, the strength and stamina for its marathon length, and the intellect necessary to make lucid its grinding dissonance and (in the finale) its pounding counterpoint. Perhaps Richter thought that at 60--his age when he began to program it--he was a little too old for the Hammerklavier. Certainly, even a Richter enthusiast can be forgiven for wishing the pianist had turned to the piece 10 years earlier. Still, the pianist's Hammerklavier is heroically grand and fiercely energetic. Of the three performances of the sonata that Richter gave in a two-week period (and that have been preserved on disc) in London, Prague, and Aldeburgh (this disc), this recording is probably best-suited to most listeners. While not as exciting as the risk-taking Prague performance, it is much better recorded and more accurate. It also contains several bonuses: beautifully played versions of Beethoven's Sonata No. 3 and of three bagatelles from the composer's Opus 126. --Stephen Wigler