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

Such Stuff As Dreams... offers soothing music whose gentle melodies have a quality of innocence and whose unhurried rhythms are gently swaying. Rosenberger has once again put together a program drawn from great piano classics, including beautiful little pieces written especially for children.

Such Stuff... includes a unique companion disc, which Rosenberger explains: "In this lullaby album I included three lovely melodies - one by Mozart, one by Schubert, and one by Beethoven - each created by a great master as a basis for a famous theme-and-variation work. The Such Stuff... disc lets you get to know the melodies by themselves. The companion disc shows you what wonderful music evolved from each melody."

This set is the third and last volume of François-Frédéric Guy’s complete recording of the Beethoven sonatas. In addition to the first three (op.2), it contains the late sonatas, including the celebrated ‘Hammerklavier’. This sonata is not only one of the cornerstones of the cycle, but also a key work in François-Frédéric Guy’s personal musical trajectory; this is the third time he has recorded it. François-Frédéric Guy chose to record the entire series live, in the course of a series of concerts at the Arsenal de Metz, France. He firmly believes that this method, in direct contact with an audience, is the best way to represent his relationship with the sonatas and the interpretation of them he wishes to project.

Director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

New Release on Euroarts's new sub-label: Recorded Excellence – Historical Value. The aim of the new series is to make accessible to music lovers and collectors top-quality recordings documenting extra-special concert performances that were hitherto unreleased or were no longer available, either for the first time or as re-releases on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The main focus is on artists and repertoire. The new series will showcase defining concert moments of music history.

True HD picture! Digitally remastered and restored from 35mm film. Including intensive and high-quality audio and visual restoration.

In this recording, seven-time GRAMMY® Award-winning pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim tackles the so-called 'New Testament' of music, Ludwig van Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas.

Composed over twenty-five years and embodying the shift of musical taste from the Classic to the Romantic, their performance requires a musician of extraordinary versatility.

Daniel Barenboim is one such pianist – his recordings run the gamut from Bach and Mozart to Bruckner and Bartók. In following in the footsteps of such masters as Artur Schnabel, Barenboim truly shows himself to be among the greatest living musicians.

Bonus: 10 min. Interview with Daniel Barenboim, Vienna 2012, about the recording and the production of the complete Beethoven Sonatas Cycle 1980 - 1984.

Special Digipak packaging in a luxury slipcase.

Picture format: 1080i Full HD 16:9

Sound format: PCM Stereo

Region code: 0

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Running time: 724 mins (714 mins Concert + 10 mins Interview)

There have been few pianists of Arrau’s range and stature, and these invaluable live recordings can only reaffirm memories of another time, another place, where sheer musical calibre and quality counted above all. Liner notes written by Bryce Morrison.

Previously unissued; released by permission of the Arrau Estate

And Sviatoslav Richter was a genius, a giant, a universal musical mind, free of idiosyncrasies, fashionable styles or cheap tricks; he represents music making of the highest order.

Richter’s Beethoven, is strong and passionate, yet sober and purist, never exaggerated, getting straight to the deeper meaning of the music. The highlights from this selection of Beethoven piano sonatas are the last three sonatas Opp. 109-110-111, one the best of his many recordings of these eternal works. Awarded with a Diapason d’Or in France.

Did Richter give more concerts than any other pianist of the 20th century? It’s certainly possible. He shunned the high life and lights to set up a festival in a barn in southwest France; to drag himself across the plains and mountains of Soviet Russia, playing Hindemith and more to audiences who likely had never even heard a piano – as well as getting in six hours of practice.

Such was his appetite for making music, and his scorn for the merry-go-round of record companies and ritzy recitals. This release focuses on his mastery of Beethoven: strong and determined, as you’d expect from a pianist who was always his own harshest critic, and capable of thundering heights of eloquence, but more often bringing out Beethoven the quixotic poet in, say, the questing opening movement of Op.110 or the mysterious Arietta which concludes the composer’s cycle of 32 sonatas. A complementary recording of the Third Concerto is made with Kurt Sanderling, one of the most durable and understanding of his conducting partners.

This fine set is released by Solstice to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of Yvonne Lefébure. Her passion for Beethoven goes back a long way, in fact to the tender age of 13, when the critics were already praising her. This fitting set features all her recorded works, plus the previously unreleased piano concerto No.4 and the three Violin & Piano sonatas with violinist Sándor Végh.

The public image of Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) is divided: for some, he is one of the most important Beethoven interpreters of the 20th century, whereas others perceive him as an enfant terrible whose battle against the cultural establishment and the constraints of the music business, which limited his multifaceted artistic interests and talents, became legendary.As ever, such generalisations are both true and false. This compilation of hitherto unreleased recordings made by Gulda for the RIAS Berlin between 1950 and 1959 enables us to experience the pianist and musician Gulda in a more differentiated and unprejudiced manner. For even here, the 'complete musician' - as Gulda saw himself throughout his career - comes into view.The spectrum of recordings which, given the almost frightening concert and recording activities Gulda tackled during this decade, only represents the tip of the iceberg, speaks for itself: it stretches from Mozart to Prokofiev and shows Gulda to be a universal artist who, from the beginning, sought to combine the highest possible degree of objectivity and authenticity with the greatest intensity of music-making. Gulda's musical and pianistic foundations had been laid in Vienna by his teacher Bruno Seidlhofer, who had formed nearly all the important pianists of the 'Viennese School'; the quality of Gulda's training was confirmed by his being awarded the first prize at the Geneva Piano Competition in 1946 which Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli had won before him. Gulda looked for role models who displayed a spontaneous and at the same time controlled intensity in their playing, and he found them in American Jazz, whose inexorable rise in post-war Europe was to fascinate him throughout his career. The early Mozart and Beethoven recordings, made in 1950, demonstrate Gulda's phenomenal analytical understanding of compositional structures and his unerring sense of rhythm and touch. His Chopin and Ravel recordings are sensational: on the highest pianistic level, Chopin's Prélude Op. 28 and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit are presented in a rare, incisive manner on both a musical and dramatic level.With his interpretation of two important early works by Debussy, the Suite pour le Piano and the Suite bergamasque, as well as a selection of the Préludes, Gulda also proves to be one of the few non-French pianists who found a decidedly modern and yet authentic access to these masterworks.The programme closes with single pieces by Chopin (Nocturne in C minor,Op. 48 No. 1 and Berceuse Op. 60), demonstrating Gulda's intensive exploration of romantic works, as well as a spectacular recording of Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7 Op. 83, made in 1950. Prokofiev's music, whose wildness in the end proved incompatible with Gulda, did not remain in his repertoire for long; he did, however, pass on important impulses to his most famous pupil, Martha Argerich.

See also the Russian Legends box set.