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

asin: B00004UAOE binding: Audio CD list price: $17.98 USD amazon price: $17.98

This two-disc set commemorates the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont by several distinguished European musicians, including violinist Adolf Busch; his brother, cellist Herman Busch; and his son-in-law, pianist Rudolf Serkin. Marlboro, a unique community of artists of different generations and backgrounds who inspire and teach one another, has opened the world of chamber music to many young musicians and become a breeding ground for fledgling ensembles. Many of the participants on this recording are now renowned soloists, chamber musicians, and orchestra principals. And the playing is fabulous. In the Beethoven Concerto, Serkin plays with a beautiful sound, great expressiveness, and freedom, taking all the time in the world to caress every note and nuance; his transitions are miracles of poise, his climaxes are grand. In the slow movement, a supplicant pleads with a stern deity; in the finale, humanity's joy of life is restored. Schneider's conducting is sympathetic, but not always synchronized with the soloist. Serkin's son Peter conducts the Choral Fantasy, a piece hastily written for a special occasion and its performing forces, not unlike those at Marlboro. Together with its message of musical uplift (no text is included), this makes it singularly appropriate for the Festival, though with its bombastic beginning and somewhat trite Theme and Variations, it depends on the performers' enthusiasm to make it work. The second disc features the strings and winds. Dvorák's Quintet Op. 77, an early work despite the late opus number, adds a bass to the string quartet, enhancing the sonority and allowing the cellist free use of the upper register. The performance, which includes the second movement Dvorák later removed and recast as an orchestral Nocturne, is beautiful, making the most of the work's youthful exuberance and lovely Bohemian melodies, and almost concealing the composer's still imperfect command of developing his material. By contrast, Janácek wrote his wind sextet Youth when he was 70, at the peak of his mature skill, yet it, too, has an amazingly fresh, buoyant vitality. Vigorous, mournful, spooky, lyrical--its mercurial moods and beguiling melodies make it irresistible, and the performance is terrific. --Edith Eisler

author: Franz Liszt asin: 0486401146 binding: Paperback list price: $18.95 USD amazon price: $14.78 USD

Memorable tribute from one musical genius to another, reproduced from authoritative editions, reveals Liszt's remarkable capacity for translating orchestral effects into pianistic terms. An astonishing, brilliant and sensitive tribute to the master by the 19th-century's greatest piano virtuoso.

asin: B00004U35D binding: Audio CD list price: $34.98 USD amazon price: $34.98

When compact discs first came out, the first thing many longtime collectors wanted to know was, When does Schnabel's Beethoven become available? That the pianist's pioneering recordings of Beethoven's 32 Sonatas for Piano have been in print almost continuously since 1935 testifies to the esteem in which they continue to be held. Schnabel's performances are best heard in Pearl's five full-priced sets (about $180), rather than in EMI's less expensive box set (just under $80). Listeners who cannot afford such an investment owe it to themselves to investigate this two-disc sampler from Pearl, featuring Sonatas Nos. 8 ("Pathétique"), 14 ("Moonlight"), 15 ("Pastoral"), 21 ("Waldstein"), 23 ("Appassionata"), 26 ("Les Adieux"), and 29 ("Hammerklavier"). Schnabel was a founding father of musical modernism, which demanded that music be performed exactly as written, with the performer serving as no more than a transparent medium. Fortunately, Schnabel's ideology was not consistent with his practice. His softening of melodic contours, his free changing of tempos, his imaginative use of tone colors, his mailed-fist-in-a-velvet-glove power, and the unearthly beauty of his singing legato in pianissimo passages were those of a full-blown Romantic pianist. Certainly, no one ever served Beethoven's music better. Whether in the chain-reaction explosions of the "Appassionata," the sustained reveries of the opening movement of the "Moonlight," or the contrapuntal complexities of the finale of the "Hammerklavier," Schnabel never failed to demonstrate a genius for keeping the listener's ears in a state of perpetual expectation. --Stephen Wigler