Artur Schnabel play Mozart
Mozart: | Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K595 Recorded 2nd May, 1934 in EMI Abbey Road Studio No. 1, London London Symphony Orchestra, John Barbirolli Rondo in A minor, K511 Recorded 4th June, 1946 in EMI Abbey Road Studio No. 3, London Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra No. 10 in E flat, K365 Recorded 28th October, 1936 in EMI Abbey Road Studio No. 1, London with Karl Ulrich Schnabel (piano) London Symphony Orchestra, Adrian Boult |
Not long after his February 1934 London Queen’s Hall concert comprising three Mozart concertos, Schnabel made his first recording of a Mozart piano concerto, No. 27 in B flat major, K.595, at the recently opened and well equipped Abbey Road Studios. Completed in one session, this recording is notable not only for the excellence of its sound but for the moulding of the slow movement, taken at a slow tempo, but without any loss of the tension between successive notes or of the coherence of harmonic progressions. Schnabel’s recording of the Concerto for two pianos, with his son Karl Ulrich, is made up entirely of first takes. In the Rondo in A minor, K.511, Schnabel beautifully shapes the phrases and avoids sentimentality or overt intensity of expression. “Often, when he played Mozart or Schubert, Artur Schnabel would be told that he made the music ‘greater than it is’…..That said, it needed someone to lift Mozart on to a pedestal alongside Bach and Beethoven, and, among pianists, Schnabel was as well equipped as anyone to do this” Gramophone | 
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