Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109

The much anticipated release of Volume 3 marks Roscoe’s 60th birthday celebrations.

Following the success of Volumes 1 and 2, we are delighted to present The Final Trilogy – Volume 3 of Martin Roscoe’s complete Beethoven Sonata series. Martin Roscoe is a versatile musician who endeavours always to serve the composer and the music. His enduring popularity and solid reputation are built on a deeply thoughtful musicianship that is allied to an easy rapport with audiences and fellow musicians alike.

Martin is one of the most regularly played pianists on BBC Radio 3 and they highly praised his second disc in this series (Waldstein, DXL1162) describing is as “one of the truly great recordings of the Waldstein Sonata…perfect musical judgement and a formidable technique from Martin Roscoe”

Sviatoslav Richter’s comment that Hungarian-born Annie Fischer (1914–1995) was ‘a great artist imbued with a spirit of greatness and genuine profundity’ is just a sign of the esteem in which her fellow musicians held her. Curiously, of all the mid-century pianists, she seems to have been among the least recorded due to her profound dislike of the studio. Winner of the Franz Liszt International Competition in 1933, she made recordings of Schumann and Liszt with Klemperer (a close friend), Bartók with Markevitch and Mozart with Sawallisch. She recorded over a 15-year period all the Beethoven sonatas for Hungaroton.

Annie Fischer’s ‘unerring awareness’ (David Threasher) of the shifting moods in the Schumann Piano Concerto has been caught in wonderful sound by the WDR engineers in this ‘live’ recording which has never been issued before.

In the two Beethoven works, ‘she is powerfully authoritative’ (David Threasher).

Both these ‘live’ recordings have never been published before.

Maurizio Pollini said Fischer’s playing was marked by ‘a childlike simplicity, immediacy and wonder’ while the distinguished writer Bryce Morrison commented on her ‘depth and spiritual serenity’. All these recordings are great additions to her relatively small discography.

Among his generation of concert artists, pianist Awadagin Pratt is acclaimed for his musical insight and intensely involving performances in recital and with symphony orchestras. Early in his career, Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition becoming the first African-American classical instrumentalist to win first prize in this international competition. Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, his second release from EMI Classics, Pratt tackles Beethoven’s late piano sonatas with a robust freshness and unaffected musicality. The result is intimate, playful, and charming.

Alexei Lubimov’s 2010 disc of Impromptus by Schubert was praised in the press. During the same recording session in Haarlem in July 2009, Alexei Lubimov continued with the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Beethoven’s musical testimony which he plays with all the mastery of a great russian pianist, "a kind of russian Pollini" (Alain Lompech, Diapason).

“They must be played ‘uncomfortably’, ‘intangibly’; nothing in them reveals itself, nothing ‘plays itself’, and one must take enormous pains to ‘elucidate’ the text for oneself… these sonatas are divorced from the keyboard instrument itself… as if the musical content of these sonatas ‘disregards’ the instrument to hand, overcoming its material nature and its historical characteristics… I felt still more strongly how astonishing, how unusual the compositional material is and how tenaciously Beethoven seeks to consolidate, extend, and transform for his own idiosyncratic purposes the forms and structural principles he inherited from his predecessors.” Alexei Lubimov

Alexei Lubimov belongs both to the great Russian tradition of pianists such as Richter and Gilels (he was the one of the last pupils of Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow) and to the generation of Early Music pioneers that includes Gustav Leonhardt and the Kuijken brothers. He is also a leading interpreter of such modern composers as Denisov, Schnittke, Silvestrov and Arvo Pärt.

With this triple cultural background, Alexei Lubimov has pursued an exceptional international career. In 1968 he was in Brussels to play Denisov when he met the Kuijkens. He gave the first performances in the USSR of John Cage and Terry Riley. In the 1970s he founded the Moscow Baroque Quartet, the first Soviet ensemble of its kind, with which he rediscovered the Baroque repertoire on period instruments. This was followed in the 1980s by the creation of the avant-garde Alternativa festival in Moscow and a modern and historical keyboard class at the Moscow Conservatory. Alexei Lubimov is also professor of fortepiano at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

This disc presents three sonatas, No. 1, No. 23 (Appassionata"), and No. 30, performed by 2008 Grammy-winning pianist, Garrick Ohlsson. In the words of annotator Frank Cooper, “Three stages of greatness- exploratory, revolutionary, visionary- are represented here…”

“The god of inspiration sprints hand in hand with Garrick Ohlsson” Classics Today on a previous volume