Johannes Brahms

Van Cliburn’s one and only appearance at the Salzburg Festival was a huge success with the audience. The present live recording underlines not only the young pianist’s technical brilliance but also the originality of his interpretations in repetoire that is not limited to a particular musical epoch. Van Cliburn never returned to the Salzburg Festival, even though Die Presse asserted that “he has every right to be regarded as a star and is a dazzling pianist in every sense of that term. His concert is well-suited to any festival of international standing…including the Salzburg Festival.”

In June this year, after an absence of a quarter-century, the legendary Maurizio Pollini returned to Dresden’s Semperoper to play Brahms’s First Piano Concerto under the baton of Christian Thielemann. Not at all surprisingly, they brought the house down.

Although Barbirolli’s achievement in rebuilding the war-ravaged Hallé Orchestra during the darkest days of the Second World War may remain the greatest fulfilment of his life, his renown as a conductor within the United States was not confined to his New York era. From 1961-67 Barbirolli was music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra in Texas, holding the post concurrently with that in Manchester, and in 1967, marking the 125 anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, he was invited back to conduct the orchestra at Lincoln Center. But even before then, Barbirolli’s appearances in north America would seem to demand a special study by themselves, for early in 1959 he gave several concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as part of a quite extended tour involving a number of the greatest American and Canadian orchestras, including those in Winnipeg and Vancouver alongside those in Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York (where in the last city he conducted no fewer than sixteen concerts).

The issue under discussion commemorates a typical Barbirolli programme, given in Boston on consecutive days in January 1959, notable for half of it being given over to British music, in essence from the sixteenth-century to the twentieth. Barbirolli never ‘drove’ the Symphony No.2 by Brahms, which approach can be profoundly detrimental to its inner qualities – for this conductor, the nature of the music was essentially Brahms at his most lyrically expressive, and there can be no doubt that for the Boston players, Barbirolli’s view of the work came as something of a revelation: they had performed it under Monteux and Koussevitsky – string players both, like Barbirolli – but the Englishman brought something of a southern European nature to the music, allowing it to unfold at its own pace, yet at all times never allowing a trace of somnolence to enter his interpretation.

Barbirolli treads a fine line, but it is remarkably successful and interpretatively impressive, as the Boston players surely felt so themselves, for in a letter home to his mother, written in Boston on February 1, he said ‘…this Boston orchestra is perhaps the greatest of the lot…The other day after I had rehearsed the 2nd Brahms symphony the whole orchestra stood and cheered me for quite some time, and they have done the same at both concerts…It was lovely, too, to have both the present conductor, [Charles] Münch, and one of the past conductors, Pierre Monteux, both there.’ After that first concert, we learn that all three conductors had a ‘memorable dinner’ together afterwards – the conversation at which would surely have also been worth recording!

Craig Morris has transcribed four major works for trumpet and piano in this voyage of sonic discovery, reclothing them in new textures and colours. An original arrangement of Debussy’s beautiful Suite Bergamasque is followed by transcriptions of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke and Brahms’s Sonata for Clarinet (or Viola) and Piano, Op. 120, No. 2. The Schumann and Brahms were originally conceived for multiple instruments, and Morris has created these versions from the same mould. The recording closes with the richly romantic Four Songs by Samuel Barber. Ex-principal of the Chicago Symphony, international soloist and chamber musician, Craig Morris can also be heard on the première recording of Thom Sleeper’s Concerto on Naxos 8570465.

Munch met and heard Richter in 1958 when the Boston Symphony Orchestra toured Russia. He was so impressed that he invited him to appear with the BSO.

Richter’s Boston debut two years later, is presented here from the original stereo tapes for the first time. “The result took your breath away” Boston Globe

Naïve’s prestigious ‘Cité de la Musique’ series presents a new recording of pieces originally written for - and here played on - a rarely performed instrument of the past, the pedal piano. This intriguing CD includes two monumental works by Franz Liszt, Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine and the Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H, as well as music by Boëly, Schumann’s Four Sketches opus 58, two preludes by Alkan, and Brahms’ Prelude and Fugue in G minor Woo 10.

The Cité de la Musique in Paris is a major centre covering all musical genres and repertoires. Along with two concert halls, it includes a museum of early instruments. Naïve and the Cité de la Musique have launched a series in which great performers record on legendary instruments. This new volume is dedicated to an instrument scarcely played, the pedal piano, which belongs to a line of instruments which, like the organ, are equipped with a pedal keyboard. In the middle of the 19th century several major composers wrote pieces for pedal piano, including those featured on this CD.

Olivier Latry is regarded as one of the leading organists of his generation, both in France and on the international scene. After a period as organist of Meaux Cathedral from 1981 to 1985, he was only twenty-three when selected by competitive examination to become principal organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The London String Quartet was Britain’s leading chamber ensemble for two decades and 2010 marked the centenary of its first concerts. Equally well known in America, this collection includes five programmes performed at the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1951, issued here for the first time. The collection includes well known works, as well as more obscure ones by Bridge, Kreisler and Foster.