Brahms: Rhapsody in G minor, Op. 79 No. 2

There is a great variety of performers, traditions, and composers represented in volume 4 of this pioneering series.

The pianists comprise the well known, the undeservedly neglected, and the tragic. One such is Rosa Tamarkina, a prodigiously talented musician, who died at 30. There is Liza Fuchsova, a brilliant Czech, who can be heard in a rare 1944 HMV disc. Lilly Dymont was recorded in Berlin in 1930, Marie-Thérèse Fourneau in wartime Paris, and Winifred Christie in London in 1921. Of volume 3 (8111217) Gramophone wrote: ‘a fascinating series… and brilliant assembly, which makes you look forward to volume 4.’

Over two evenings in 1983 (4 February and 7 November) in the concert hall of Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, the world-famous pianist Ivan Moravec spellbound the audience with his majestic performance. This master of the piano’s precision marries cultivated tone and widely differentiated articulation, augmented by deep musical élan.

Each tone has absolute logic within the order of the composition he interprets, be it Beethoven’s expansive Sonata in D major, “Pastoral”, or the seemingly smaller pieces by Brahms and Chopin. And it is precisely in the latter that Ivan Moravec excels as a master of tiny area, which he wondrously chases in stylistic terms and renders ebulliently.

The live recording breathes in the airy atmosphere of the concert hall, one that can hardly be evoked in studio albums. The recording clearly shows that the world of Beethoven’s, Chopin’s and Brahms’s piano works is close to the essence of Moravec’s being.

There is no substitute for the wisdom of age and experience. Earl Wild, the legendary 86-year-old Grammy Award-winning virtuoso pianist, in a new recording of Brahms. "Of the great many recordings of Brahms' monumental Sonata No. 3 that I have heard, Earl Wild's is far and away the most fully realized, the most musically satisfying, and the most breathtaking. His performance is simultaneously spacious and taut, orchestrally textured and utterly transparent, sweeping in feel and elegantly detailed. Wild's command of the Sonata is so complete and his playing (even at 86) so brilliantly captures its expansive tonal palette, volatile drama and its exquisite poetry, we are apt to forget that Brahms' writing teems with technical difficulties. Wild's Paganini Variations have irresistible flair - they are as brilliant musically as they are technically. The recording as a whole is unsurpassable."

A national hero when he was only 23 years old, pianist Van Cliburn has been one of classical music’s few true household names ever since his triumph at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow – the first American ever to win there, a Cold War – thawing phenomenon that led to a frenzied ticker-tape parade for Cliburn in New York. He was one of the first million-selling classical artists in the LP era, and his catalogue of critically hailed, best selling recordings for RCA Red Seal includes many of the most popular concertos and solo piano works of the Romantic era.