Brahms: Intermezzo in A minor, Op. 118 No. 1

Van Cliburn’s one and only appearance at the Salzburg Festival was a huge success with the audience. The present live recording underlines not only the young pianist’s technical brilliance but also the originality of his interpretations in repetoire that is not limited to a particular musical epoch. Van Cliburn never returned to the Salzburg Festival, even though Die Presse asserted that “he has every right to be regarded as a star and is a dazzling pianist in every sense of that term. His concert is well-suited to any festival of international standing…including the Salzburg Festival.”

American Record Guide described the Vocalensemble Rastatt; “Its sound is akin to pure gold.” Under their conductor Holger Speck, the ensemble has developed into a top-class chamber of international standing. Their performances are distinguished by their spirited, compelling and historically informed interpretations in the most varied styles.

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.

The Canadian musician Glenn Gould was undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists of all time. To mark the 75th anniversary of his birth, and the 25th anniversary of his death, Sony BMG Masterworks presents this seminal artist’s vinyl recordings as re-mastered CDs, designed to replicate the exact artwork of the original gramophone records in miniaturised form. Already issued as part of an 80-CD box set (88697130942), these albums are now being made available individually, with the first 20 in the series being released in November 2007.