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

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