Ludwig van Beethoven

Deutsche Grammophon’s Complete Beethoven Edition of 1997 was one of the great events in recording history – an 87-CD set that served as a monument to the world’s greatest composer.

Now DG are offering, in a limited edition, a box set of Beethoven Masterworks, covering the complete range of Beethoven’s works on 51 CDs.

The Edition: from Symphonies to Folksong Settings, and in between Overtures, Concertos, Piano Trios, String Quartets, Chamber Music for Wind Instruments, String Trios, Cello Sonatas, Violin Sonatas, Piano Sonatas, Lieder, Masses, rare Large Choral Works, and Fidelio

The Artists: almost all CDs are individual albums – presented in the original jackets – by the greatest artists. Some examples: for the Symphonies we’ve got Abbado, Gardiner, Kleiber, Bernstein and Karajan; for the Piano Concertos, we’ve got Argerich, Zimerman and Pollini; for the String Quartets we've got the Melos, Emerson and Hagen

The greatest cellist of the early 20th century, Pablo Casals is renowned for the inimitably beautiful timbre and expressive range of his playing. This extensive collection brings together his classic interpretations of the Elgar and Dvorák cello concertos, combined with a variety of suites, piano trios, national Catalonian dances and other showpieces.

Multi-award winning opera singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, praised for the ‘pristine beauty of her lyric soprano’ (The Guardian), was revered in opera houses worldwide and is perhaps most famous for her Mozart roles. However, she was also at home on the concert stage and this collection combines her acclaimed portrayals of Donna Elvira, Countess Almaviva and Richard Strauss’s Marschallin, among others, with her affecting interpretations of lieder and song-cycles.

For her debut recording for Brilliant Classics, young Dutch cellist Amber Docters van Leeuwen has chosen a wildly varying programme: starting off in the classical yet highly personal and original style of the late Beethoven cello sonatas, she moves to that other classic for the cello, the Debussy sonata.

Then she enters the unsettling world of Alfred Schnittke, whose eclectic and highly dramatic first cello sonata was written in 1978. She ends her journey with Flavours by Eef van Breen, written for Amber, an out of the box extravaganza in Jazz style, bitter, sweet, salty and spicy.

Amber Docters van Leeuwen took her tuition with Dmitri Ferschtman in Amsterdam, then continued at the Manhattan School of Music, where she graduated with honours. Her repertoire and concert programmes combine the classical with the experimental, and she regularly partners with musicians like Bobby McFerrin, Jef Neve and Gabriel Rios. She was winner of several international competitions, notably the first Amsterdam Cello Biennnale in 2008.

Described by critics as a ‘bona fide angel playing’ and an ‘electrifying pianist’, the young Ukrainian-born, North Carolina-based Valentina Lisitsa has been receiving rave reviews ever since her début in Avery Fisher Hall for the Mostly Mozart Festival. It would be hard to conceive of a more thoroughly Romantic or demanding programme than she presents here: Beethoven’s radical ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, via Schumann’s musical expression of an adult’s memories of childhood and Thalberg’s fantastic transformation of themes from Rossini’s most popular opera to Liszt’s pianistic danse macabre, inspired by a fresco by the medieval Italian artist Francesco Traini.

28CD & 1DVD (NTSC Region 0)

Released on the RCA Red Seal label, this stunning budget-priced boxset brings together for the first time all the live & studio recordings of legendary pianist Harvey Lavan ‘Van’ Cliburn - from his 1958 debut recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninov’s No. 3 to his personal selections of favourite Chopin, Brahms & Debussy pieces, the popular album of Favourite Encores to his last recording for RCA with Brahms pieces, released in 1977. Also contains a CD with selections from his performances in Moscow in 1972, as well as the DVD “Van Cliburn, Concert Pianist”, a film by Peter Rosen.

Acclaimed Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos makes his Decca Classics debut with the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas. A young artist of rare quality, Leonidas Kavakos won the Sibelius Violin Competition in 1985, when still in his teens and, three years later, the Paganini Competition.

Often described as “the violinist’s violinist”, Der Tagesspiegel wrote that Kavakos has “quite possibly the most beautiful violin tone imaginable”.

He has appeared with conductors including Riccardo Chailly, Valery Gergiev and Iván Fischer, and with the world’s major orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester, London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

This title was released for the first time in 1999 and was one of the first to use Jonathan del Mar's edition in which textual errors and ambiguities are corrected.