Frédéric François Chopin

Over two evenings in 1983 (4 February and 7 November) in the concert hall of Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, the world-famous pianist Ivan Moravec spellbound the audience with his majestic performance. This master of the piano’s precision marries cultivated tone and widely differentiated articulation, augmented by deep musical élan.

Each tone has absolute logic within the order of the composition he interprets, be it Beethoven’s expansive Sonata in D major, “Pastoral”, or the seemingly smaller pieces by Brahms and Chopin. And it is precisely in the latter that Ivan Moravec excels as a master of tiny area, which he wondrously chases in stylistic terms and renders ebulliently.

The live recording breathes in the airy atmosphere of the concert hall, one that can hardly be evoked in studio albums. The recording clearly shows that the world of Beethoven’s, Chopin’s and Brahms’s piano works is close to the essence of Moravec’s being.

Extensive booklet with notes on each work by Ate?s Orga.

A must-have for lovers of chamber music.

‘Oistrakh plays with the authority we know so well, Knushevitsky, who has a part of predominant importance and sometimes of great difficulty, mostly plays beautifully, and Oborin is excellent. The ensemble of the soloists is superbly good.’ Gramophone reviewing the Beethoven Triple Concerto conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent in 1959

For a quarter of a century from its foundation in 1940, the Oistrakh Trio was the premiere ensemble of its kind in the Soviet Union. All three members were close friends, having trained and studied together during the Stalin years.

They blossomed in the comparatively more relaxed Khrushchev period, championing the great Austro-German and Slavonic repertoire for piano trio.

Never afraid to speak out against injustices in the USSR, they championed composers who were suffering under the oppressive regime – hence the movement from Shebalin’s Trio included on this set. The recordings date from 1947 to 1958, and capture this extraordinary group of musicians at the top of their game.

This title continues the Goldenweiser School, the last of the three great teaching traditions to be covered in this comprehensive survey of the many great pianists who worked in Russia in the Soviet era. The bulk of the issues in THE RUSSIAN PIANO TRADITION will be divided into 'schools' which represent the three main teachers of this period - Neuhaus, Goldenweiser and Igumnov, - and their pupils.

One of the youngest pianists to be featured in this series, Victor Merzhanov is more a grand-pupil of Goldenweiser than a pupil, as his major professor was Samuil Feinberg. It seems certain though, that while studying with one of Goldenweiser's most illustrious pupils he would also have had contact with the great man. Merzhanov graduated from the Moscow conservatory in 1942 and, after war service, shared first prize in the 1945 All-Union piano competition with Sviatoslav Richter. He began teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1947 and, at the age of 90, continues to teach and serve on competition juries today.

Merzhanov quickly became renowned as a Rachmaninov interpreter and his recording of the Third Concerto is one of the greatest, he also made the first recording of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata. He was most prolific in the recording studio in the 1950's and his performances are characterised by peerless technique (witness the Liszt 'Paganini' Studies included here) and a generous, but never self-serving, emotional involvement with the music. Once again the quality of the playing revealed here shows that our view of who are the 'greats' of Soviet pianism has been very much dictated by those performers who had careers in the west. As this series of CDs has shown, Gilels and Richter were not isolated peaks; the likes of Oborin, Zak, and here, Merzhanov, were certainly their musical equals.

At the age of 17, American pianist Kevin Kenner participated in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and was awarded the 10th prize and a special prize from the jury for his promising talent. Ten years later he returned to Warsaw to win top prize, the People’s Prize and the Polonaise Prize. This release emphasizes the sublime talents of Kevin Kenner in a delightful programme of Chopin works.

2 CDs for the price of 1.

Michael Zadora is one of the most obscure pianists to have recorded prolifically in the 78rpm era. Only a handful of 78s have ever been reissued, and no LP or CD has ever been devoted to him. It would appear that his concert career was also not particularly high profile, yet from these recordings it seems he was a very significant artist. Perhaps the answer lies in his background. He was born in the New York of aristocratic Polish parents but returned to Europe to study and was a pupil of Leshetizky and Barth (who also taught Rubinstein). After the First World War he became a disciple of Busoni and indeed played for the great artist on his deathbed. Zadora seems to have been a rather reserved character, much more an intellectual than someone who enjoyed public performance and it is likely that family wealth allowed him the luxury of not have to pursue his career too aggressively. On the other hand, studio recording suited him very well indeed and he seems equally at home in the standard repertoire, such as Chopin, and in more rarefied material, such as the Busoni Sonatinas, where we are undoubtedly hearing an interpretation very close to that of the composer himself. Of particular interest are Zadora's own unusual transcriptions and also the works of 'Pietro Amadis' who was actually a pseudonym of the pianist.

These very rare recordings should be of particular interest to all lovers of historic piano playing.

1958 was a red-letter year not only in music competition history but in the entire history of performance. For it was then that 23-year-old Van Cliburn of Texas won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, taking with him both the hearts of the Russian people and his jury (which included such luminaries as Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Richter and Gilels). Thawing the political freeze between Russia and America, he went on to achieve a celebrity and charisma unknown since the days of Liszt and Paderewski. But Cliburn’s only London solo concert, given at the Royal Festival Hall one year later, was a no less remarkable event. There I joined a capacity audience (including a bevy of Hollywood stars) on a hot summer afternoon to witness playing of a wholly extraordinary communicative character and power. And, strolling down memory lane and listening once more to one of the most remarkable recitals ever given on the South Bank, one word comes to mind above all others and that is ‘eloquence’. It is surely a truism to say that today, as never before, the world is teeming with pianists whose mechanical skill is unmatched by a convincing musical voice or sound. Cliburn’s technique – something far transcending mere mechanics in its overwhelming range, colour and sonority – was immense and yet was always at the service of a generous spirit, anxious only to celebrate and share great music. Throughout this recital he ‘speaks’ with a voice and sonority uniquely his own. Expectation pulsed at fever pitch, yet Cliburn’s vast audience was taken by surprise when he launched into the National Anthem, milked and thundered for all its worth; a lavish and very Texan tribute to the British people (in today’s parlance, to ‘that special relationship’). But then came Mozart and the Sonata in C, K.330, gently and affectionately confided, alive with that unmistakable full and ‘golden’ Cliburn tone and a legato and cantabile ‘more Russian than the Russians’. Yet at the same time everything was delicately and imaginatively pointed with a special sense of Mozart’s poetic ambiguity, his subtle and melancholic undertow. From the booklet note by Bryce Morrison

"Zhang demonstrated a musical maturity almost unimaginable in one so young." DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Rare and unreleased material recorded 1939-1958.