Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111

Although he attended the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of ten and five years later studied with Liszt’s pupil Eugen d’Albert for a short time, Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969) otherwise received no formal training. He was no stranger to England, having made his London début at the age of sixteen and, when only twenty-one, in the same year that he won the Anton Rubinstein prize in Paris, he took up a post at the Royal Northern College of Music. While there Backhaus deputised for an indisposed Alexander Siloti at a Manchester Hallé Orchestra concert under the great Austro-Hungarian conductor Hans Richter (1843-1916). It was Richter who had conducted the Vienna première of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and he offered interpretive advice to Backhaus.

In April 1960 Backhaus was at the BBC for a broadcast of three Beethoven Sonatas – Les Adieux, Op.81a, Moonlight, Op.27 No.2 and the last great Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.111. The latter two from this particular broadcast are heard here and most interesting in the C minor Sonata is the tempo Backhaus chooses for the Arietta. Marked Adagio molto semplice e cantabile and often played extremely slowly, Backhaus begins more at an Andante. In doing so he retains a constant tempo throughout and does not speed up for the later variations as some pianists do. The duration of just over thirteen minutes for this movement, including all the repeats, is almost identical to both his mono and stereo studio recordings whereas Wilhelm Kempff, in his mid 1960s recording, takes fifteen and a half minutes.

Backhaus only recorded a handful of Sonatas and Concertos by Mozart. He played K.330, K.331 and K.332, works favoured by many pianists, but he also played two of the earlier Piano Sonatas – K.282 and K.283. For the BBC recital in November 1961 Backhaus chose to play K.330 in C major and K.332 in F major. With a career beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the end of the 1960s, the young Backhaus would have been influenced by the performance practices of the mid-nineteenth century in Mozart playing through the ‘Dresden china’ school of playing Mozart of the 1950s. In the outer movements Backhaus tends to slow down for the second subjects to give a different and contrasting character and in the slow movements he plays with a depth of tone and feeling that may be frowned upon by some urtext performers who think they know the ‘correct’ way to play Mozart. Backhaus knew that the music speaks for itself and his line of thought and sense of structure are always clear and never sentimental. The studio recital ended with Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata.

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”

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.

Following his critically acclaimed first release for Avie of Mozart Sonatas (AV 0025), Andreas Haefliger delivers the first in a series of recital recordings that pleases and provokes in equal measure. Perspectives 1 replicates one of Haefliger's recital programmes which he has toured internationally. Underpinned by Haefliger’s hallmark Austro-Germanic repertoire – works by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert – he tantalizing includes Thomas Adès’ austere Darknesse Visible, which the composer describes as “an explosion of John Dowland’s lute song In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell.”