Scarlatti, D: Keyboard Sonata K125 in G major

“Outstanding early Gilels, with some superb Liszt including his legendary Figaro Fantasy from 1935. The Scarlatti Sonatas may not stand the test of time so well, but this is a must.” BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2012 *****

“Few pianists have possessed a more comprehensive, magisterial technique or musical integrity than Emil Gilels...And here, in Naxos's third volume, you will at once hear those salient characteristics that prompted awe and envy among Gilels's finest colleagues...[His Liszt] is overwhelming in its pulverising strength and brilliance.” Gramophone Magazine, September 2012

“The Scarlatti, Debussy and Beethoven were recorded live in London in 1984, towards the end of Gilels's life; he's dazzling in the Russian repertoire captured in 1957. The later recital is magisterial, but he's struggling.” BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2009 ****

“…Emil Gilels… in all his imperious and aristocratic glory. Seven Scarlatti sonatas show him in an inimitable if unfashionable mood, slow and romantically free in the repeated notes of the D minor Sonata, Kk141. His Debussy…sings and expands in a style far remote from a more classic French performing tradition...” Gramophone Magazine, January 2010

“The Scarlatti sonatas have a crystalline purity and breathtaking range of articulation, while the Beethoven conveys all the wholeness missing from the Waldstein, and the Scriabin musters exactly the obsessive intensity such highly wrought music demands.” The Guardian, 18th September 2009 *****

“Self-respecting pianophiles will already have most of these seminal recordings. But, compared with earlier issues, APR reveal a fuller, richer piano sound where every nuance is crystal clear and in a judiciously-enhanced ambience…APR's presentation,as usual, leaves its peers standing, fully worthy of the great artist enshrined in these magical recordings” Classic CD

“Horowitz's 1930-36 European recordings are beyond price, and so it's more than gratifying to have them permanently enshrined on APR rather than fleetingly available elsewhere. This is notably true of Horowitz's legendary, forever spine-tingling 1932 recording of the Liszt Sonata. Here, once more, is that uniquely teasing and heroic sorcery with octaves and passagework that blaze and skitter with a manic force and projection; an open defiance of all known musical and pianistic convention. Horowitz's virtuosity, particularly in his early days, remains a phenomenon, and hearing, for example, the vivamente elaboration of the principal theme or the octave uproar preceding the glassy, retrospective coda is to be reminded of qualities above and beyond the explicable. His way with the Chopin Mazurkas unites their outer dance elements and interior poetry with a mercurial brilliance and idiosyncrasy, and who but Horowitz could use his transcendental pianism to conjure a commedia dell'arte vision of such wit and caprice in Debussy's Etude, Pour les arpègescomposés? Of the previously unpublished recordings, the first movement from Chopin's Second Sonata is as macabre and tricky as ever, with a steady, oddly menacing tempo. Prokofiev's Toccata, on the other hand, is tossed off at a nail-biting speed, and not even a small but irritating cut, a wild, approximate flailing at the end and an added chord by way of compensation, can qualify the impact of such wizardry. In Rachmaninov's G minor Prelude, however, Horowitz's volatility gets the better of him. If Horowitz, in common with virtually every other pianist, was not equally convincing in every composer and was even 'a master of distortion' for some, he was a Merlin figure of an indelible, necromantic brio for all others.
Though expertly transferred, they do show their age somewhat, but nothing can lessen the impact of Horowitz's early charisma.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010