Franz Peter Schubert

Pianist Imogen Cooper continues her critically acclaimed Schubert Live series with the third 2-CD release of the composer’s late piano music, recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The highly respected and acclaimed pianist Imogen Cooper is enjoying something of a renaissance with her ongoing series of Schubert’s solo piano works on Avie. International accolades for the recordings abound, from NPR to the BBC, Gramophone to the New York Times. Imogen continues her exploration of the composer’s late piano music with Volume 3, recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2009.

Schubert was the ultimate romantic and Imogen brings out the full spectrum of his complex and colourful compositions, from the gentle German Dances, D790, and pearl-like Impromptus, D899, to the turbulent A minor Sonata, D 784, and mighty B flat Sonata, D960. Imogen says: “I’m not afraid of being described as a Schubert specialist,” even though her active repertoire ranges from Bach to Thomas Adès. “He has taken up a lot of my waking time for more than 30 years. In fact, you could say that his songs and his piano music have sometimes been close to an obsession for me.” It is more than 20 years since Cooper made a live and recorded survey of all the piano music Schubert composed from early 1823 until his death in 1828 at the age of 31. “One of the reasons I’ve taken it all up again is that I feel it ten times more strongly than I did 20 years ago: the message has become more direct to me. Schubert has become even more necessary to my well-being, and I sense strongly that he is important for an audience’s well-being too.”

'When he is at his best he plays more beautifully than any of us,' Alfred Brendel told William Steinberg, and described Kempff as 'an Aeolian harp, ever ready to respond to whatever interesting wind blew his way'. Brendel chose Kempff's 1953 Decca recording of Schubert's A minor Sonata, D.845, for inclusion in Philips' monumental 'Great Pianists of the 20th Century' series. The B flat Sonata was recorded three years earlier and has never previously been published on CD. In contrast with today's bountiful D. 960 discography, Schubert's last sonata was a relative rarity on disc when this recording first appeared, and it met with critical enthusiasm. 'Out of many lovely things in (the) first movement,' wrote the late and long-time Gramophone critic Alec Robertson, 'I will single out Kempff's playing of the second tune (F sharp minor) in which he achieves a perfect balance between the tenor and treble registers, and his instinctive feeling for the magical music hovering between D minor and B flat major, which proceeds the recapitulation - one of the supreme things in the whole of piano literature.'

In the 1000th issue of Gramophone (December 2005) the magazine asked its panel of reviewers to choose a single artist they'd like to hear perform just for them. Ivan March chose Wilhelm Kempff, and in particular, this 1950 Decca recording of Schubert's B flat sonata: 'Long ago, in my teens, I discovered the inspirational playing of Wilhelm Kempff. It is he I would invite to my command performance and it is Schubert I would ask him to play - the last, wonderful Sonata in B flat, for me the peak of 19th-century piano music. I heard it first on a Decca mono LP, elysian in his hands. But that early pressing had an irritating background swish. I tried to replace it but it appeared that all copies carried the same fault; it was some time before I secured a perfect pressing. Many years later I had afternoon tea with the illustrious Alec Robertson, whose enthusiastic review in The Gramophone had drawn me to the record. I gently took him to task about not mentioning the swish in his review. His eyes twinkled. "Ivan," he said, "the playing was so beautiful that I didn't hear the swish".'

A stunning version of Schubert’s famous ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet performed on period instruments by one of the leading string quartets of our time, the Quatuor Mosaïques.

The ‘String Quartet No.14 in D Minor’, otherwise known as The Death and the Maiden, is considered one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire. It’s a work that shows Schubert struggling in a world in which he has a lost his bearings, but also yearning for heaven. It is his testament to death. This release also features one of Schubert’s earlier quartets, the deeply foreboding D173 in G minor. This is a very dense, concise work, cohesive in its ideas, and technically challenging for its performers, with the fourth movement, especially, representing an veritable obstacle course.

The Quatuor Mosaïques decided to present these two quartets together for comparison. The juxtaposition is revealing, setting the works in perspective, providing enlightenment, emotion and enrichment, as well as allowing deeper insight. Thus the Quatuor Mosaïques continues to discover this master of the string quartet genre, Franz Schubert.

Dame Felicity Lott, revered British soprano, says of this CD:

“ Summertime also has many of my favourite songs in English, French and German. We made the CD at a friend`s house, and the sessions were so relaxed, with no London traffic to cause endless retakes! It`s a real mix of beautiful songs of all kinds, on a summer theme. I chose songs I loved, from Gershwin to Christopher Robin….

Three centuries of song are represented here, and, as BBC Music Magazine's Hilary Finch put it “such is the skill of Johnson's programming that the entire recital seems to be a single, sustained exhalation of rapture and reflection”

She went on to say:

The upper reaches of Lott's still gleaming soprano inhabit Barber's 'Shining Night' and Fauré's Clair de lune'. And her robust English version of Schubert's 'Who is Sylvia?' finds an irresistible companion in Arne's 'Where the Bee Sucks', with its veritable midsummer night's dream of an accompaniment from Johnson. The artists' palpable sense of joy and well-being gathers momentum as they visit Berlioz's 'L'île inconnue' and as they sing on the water with Schubert. . . . And Lott and Johnson know well that the only way to face sentiment is to acknowledge its own integrity, as they do when they listen to Haydn Wood's 'Little Brown Bird' and eavesdrop with Fraser-Simson on Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

This CD features songs from a great variety of composers - Gershwin, Barber, Cole Porter, Bernstein, Brahms, Schubert, Arne, Schumann, Berlioz, and many more. A full 29 tracks of summer-themed songs!

This CD features composers who have a strong creative bond with Austria, including Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner and Schönberg. The choir presents a musical documentation of typically Austrian traits: enjoyment of life, melancholy, humour and Gemütlichkeit, but also profound spirituality.

Iconic pianist Radu Lupu has been an exclusive DECCA artist for 40 years. This all-new collection brings together for the first time all of his published solo recordings for DECCA as an integral set. It features those composers with which Lupu's name has been so closely linked throughout his career and for which he has achieved worldwide acclaim: Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann.

A special bonus is the inclusion of Radu Lupu's first concerto recording - Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto - made in 1970 with the London Symphony under the direction of Lawrence Foster. It was this concerto that Lupu had played to massive acclaim when he won the 1969 Leeds Piano Competition.

2010 marks the 40th anniversary of Lupu's association with Decca and in November he celebrates his 65th birthday.

Although he has publicly expressed his dislike of the recording process and has not agreed to make any recordings in recent years, Radu Lupu continues to give recitals and perform concertos in important venues throughout the world and many of his recordings have achieved reference status.

Alexander Gauk (1893-1963) studied with Glazunov and Tcherepnin at Petrograd Conservatory. His early appointments included the Petrograd Music Drama Theatre, the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (formerly the Mariinsky, latterly the Kirov), and he went on to become principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, succeeding Nikolai Malko. He was also appointed to the role of first director of the USSR State Symphony. In addition, he taught at the conservatories in Tbilisi, Leningrad and Moscow.

Gauk premiered many works, including Shostakovich’s 3rd Symphony, The Golden Age, and The Bolt. He was a champion of Khachaturian, Miaskovsky, Prokofiev and Shaporin, and was also one of the first conductors to resurrect Rachmaninov’s 1st Symphony after its catastrophic premiere under a clearly drunk Glazunov. He rather daringly (for the time and place) tackled Mahler and Richard Strauss.

Gauk was a visceral conductor, favouring tight rhythms and driven structures, and the discipline he exerted over orchestral ensemble was breathtaking, and completely free of any blemish. His recorded legacy is extensive, and his is still a formidable name in Russian musical history.

One of the great conductors of the 20th century who was closely linked with some of the greatest Russian composers, and who premiered many of their works.

Extensive booklet notes.

Some unusual Russian repertoire is included in the set.

Konrad Jarnot has already earned great praise for his recordings of songs by Mozart, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, Ravel, Duparc, Strauss and Hermann Zilcher. With this recording of Die Schöne Müllerin, he now begins a series of the great Schubert cycles.