Felix Mendelssohn

Jan Paderewski enthralled the world with his artistry for more than half a century. Immensely popular as a recitalist (he played in Madison Square Garden to 20,000 people), he came to recording as late as 1911, leaving an important legacy.

These recordings, mostly from the 1920s and some unpublished on 78rpm, show Paderewski as a uniquely eloquent interpreter of Beethoven, his compatriot Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Rachmaninov, Debussy and his own compositions.

Whether performing in grand Romantic style, with scintillating virtuosity, or as if confiding intimate secrets, Paderewski possessed what Henry James memorably described as “exhilarating goodness”.

“Systematic treatment of Paderewski's large discography is long overdue….it is bound to entice historic piano recording collectors.” Classics Today

Auf Flügeln des Gesangs (On Wings of Song) is far and away the most popular of Mendelssohn's songs. Heard on this CD with selection of his earlier lieder this is another fine release from Carus. The tenor Hans Jörg Mammel, who enjoys an international reputation for his Lieder singing, offers with this selection, impressive insights into Mendelssohn’s Lieder. He is accompanied by Arthur Schoonderwoerd on a historic pianoforte.

Typically stirring and passionate Russian sounding performances of these two lyrical and popular pieces. As ever the Moscow String Quartet play with their customary musicianship and brilliance.

Many of the legendary opera performances and concerts that George Szell conducted in Salzburg are documented on the ORFEO label.To these, we now add two live recordings of concerts dating from 1957. In the first he is heard with the Berlin Philharmonic, which the Festival's new artistic director, Herbert von Karajan, had just introduced to Salzburg as its second great symphony orchestra alongside the Vienna Philharmonic. Szell had first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic four decades earlier in Berlin. In 1957 he was originally scheduled to give only one concert with the orchestra at the Mozarteum: an all-Mozart programme comprising the relatively little-known Symphony K201, the Piano Concerto in C major, with the then 29-year-old Leon Fleisher making his Salzburg Festival début. His precocious mellowness ideally blends with the Mozart style of Szell and the Berlin Philh. Barely a week later Szell was asked to step in at the last minute and rescue a concert in the old Festspielhaus. He conducted the concert without rehearsal from memory, reversing the planned order of pieces, ending the concert with an acclaimed performance of the'Eroica'.Yet Szell never gives the impression that in spontaneously taking over the concert he had limited himself to only the most basic essentials or that he had taken too great a risk by insisting on his own personal interpretation.Thanks to his precision and perfection the present archive recording affords further proof of George Szell's exceptional status among the leading conductors of the 20th century.

In recent years York Bowen, the composer, has enjoyed a spectacular revival, but until now his talents as pianist (barring a late recording of his own music for Lyrita) have not been heard since the days of 78s. At the height of his success, in the first decades of the 20th century, Bowen was as much known as pianist as composer and frequently performed at the Proms amongst other things. His first recording, a very rare disc on the Marathon label, was released in 1915, but the bulk of his work was done for Vocalion; after they went bankrupt in 1927 he appears to have made no further 78s. Pride of place must go to Bowen’s Beethoven 4th Piano Concerto. This was the very first recording of the work and its neglect has been due to the fact that it was one of the last recordings to be made under the old acoustic process which was superseded the year the work was issued. Bowen’s pianism is extremely fluent and he plays his own cadenzas! Through all the featured works we hear a pianist who plays in the ‘grand manner’ and that, and his preference for romantic repertoire, reveal him as somewhat atypical of the English pianist of his time. Perhaps his nickname ‘the English Rachmaninov’ did indeed hit the nail on the head.