Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58

Clara Haskil's recordings from the 1950s enjoy a cult status. Her subtle interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann enjoyed particular fame.These studio recordings and live recordings of concert performances of great piano concertos as well as of two solo works by Schumann, released for the first time remastered from the original tapes, reveal Haskil's sensitive and natural playing which Ferenc Fricsay compared to the ability to sing on the piano. In addition, this Audite release offers the opportunity to compare and contrast Mozart's famous concerto in D minor, in the form of a hitherto unpublished live recording from a concert performance, and in the form of a studio recording made only one day later, in January 1954. Fricsay and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin prove to be congenial partners of a greatly distinguished pianist.

Recorded January 2008 in Bilkent Symphony Hall, Ankara, Turkey

Second volume in the cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos performed by François-Frédéric Guy, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Philippe Jordan. François-Frédéric Guy is now firmly established as a pianist of immense interpretative authority and superlative technique. With his exceptional command of keyboard sonority he has a special gift for music of the grandest scale, such as the major works of Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven. His recording of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata for Naïve was recently picked as BBC Radio 3’s “Building a Library” choice. Philippe Jordan is one of the rising stars of the conductor’s world. He has recently been appointed as Music Director of the Opera National de Paris, starting in the 2009-10 season.

The Fourth Piano Concerto was dedicated to Beethoven’s friend, student, and patron, the Archduke Rudolph, and its first public took place on the 22nd of December 1808 in Vienna at the Theater an der Wien, where the composer himself took the stage as soloist. This was part of a marathon concert which saw Beethoven's last appearance as a soloist with orchestra, as well as the premieres of the Choral Fantasy and the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. After its first performance, the piece was neglected until 1836, when it was revived by Felix Mendelssohn. Today, it is widely performed and recorded, considered one of the central works of the piano concerto literature. The Quintet in E flat for Piano and Winds, Op. 16, was written in 1796. It was inspired by Mozart's work, K. 452, which is likewise in E flat and has the same scoring.

Hailed for his interpretation of Beethoven’s piano concertos, Irish pianist John O’Conor completes the cycle with Nos. 1, 3, and 4. Beethoven composed the first four of his five mature piano concertos for his own concerts. The Concerto No. 1 in C major (1798) was actually the second to be written, but it was given the lower number because the earlier B-flat Concerto (1795) was published several months later. The opening movement of the First Piano Concerto is indebted to Mozart for its handling of the concerto-sonata form, for its technique of orchestration, and for the manner in which piano and orchestra are integrated. The first movement of the Concerto No. 3 opens with the longest introductory orchestral tutti in Beethoven’s concertos, virtually a full symphonic exposition in itself. Of the nature of the Fourth Concerto, the music authority Milton Cross wrote, “[Here] the piano concerto once and for all shakes itself loose from the 18th century. Virtuosity no longer concerns Beethoven at all; his artistic aim here, as in his symphonies and quartets, is the expression of deeply poetic and introspective thoughts.”

Critical acclaim for John O’Conor’s Beethoven Piano Concerto recordings:

‘… in an overcrowded Beethoven concerto market these distinctive and excellently engineered performances are well worth hearing…….Beethoven’s Second and Fifth concertos make for an uncommon yet attractively contrasted CD coupling. More importantly, pianist John O’Conor and conductor Andreas Delfs invest their much-recorded scores with deep feeling, relaxed yet never draggy tempi, and freshly considered details that provide a welcome corrective to the attention-getting elbow-pokes and finger-jabs favoured by certain recent contenders in the name of “interpretation”’ GRAMOPHONE

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.

The Canadian musician Glenn Gould was undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists of all time. To mark the 75th anniversary of his birth, and the 25th anniversary of his death, Sony BMG Masterworks presents this seminal artist’s vinyl recordings as re-mastered CDs, designed to replicate the exact artwork of the original gramophone records in miniaturised form. Already issued as part of an 80-CD box set (88697130942), these albums are now being made available individually.