Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2 'Tempest'

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)

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.

Beethoven has always lain at the heart of François-Frédéric Guy’s musical endeavours, from his first disc of the ‘Hammerklavier’ op. 106 on harmonia mundi in the 1990s, which revealed him as one of the future great pianists of his generation, to his set of the concertos conducted by Philippe Jordan and a second version of the ‘Hammerklavier’.

In 2008 the festival Le Printemps des Arts de Monaco offered him the opportunity of performing a complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas over a series of concerts in a single week, an experience repeated at the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2009. A new complete cycle in concert, begun at the Arsenal de Metz in December 2009, will be completed in 2012.