Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 4 in E flat major, Op. 7

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.

To run parallel with his complete Haydn series, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is now starting a complete, chronological cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. This first set covers the sonatas composed in the 1790s. Two further volumes, of middle and late sonatas, will follow in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Each volume in the series will be available as

3 CDs for the price of 2.

In a recent cover feature in International Piano, Michael Church spoke with the pianist about the new project and reported: ‘For Bavouzet, the particular pleasure of coming to Beethoven after Haydn lies in the fact that although their basic harmonic language is roughly the same, in Beethoven’s scores the dynamics are clearly indicated, especially where they seem completely independent of the music’s so-called natural harmonic tensions.’ Bavouzet added: ‘The accents are in exactly the wrong place, and that’s what creates his music’s excitement. I am so happy to have these two streams of my work running side by side for the next few years.’

This recording covers the sonatas from Opus 2 to Opus 14, and includes a novelty: two different versions of Op. 10 No. 1. In the words of Bavouzet: ‘Professor William Drabkin has reconstructed for me the development section of the third movement. It’s based on Beethoven’s sketches, which had just one line, one voice, but all the bars are full, so we have the exact length, and the line is not always the top line. This makes us realise how he arrived at the concept of his three-movement sonatas, for this was not originally supposed to be in three movements, but four… I will also record the longer development, and the extra movement, so that people can see how he reduced and concentrated the work from four movements to three. I must stress that this is surmise, but it is very well thought through.’

Beethoven constantly calls into question and modifies the notion of time in sonata form. He never repeats himself. The thirty-two sonatas are like a voyage of initiation that runs throughout his creative career, displaying his endlessly inventive imagination.

After Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Sonata in B minor, François- Frédéric Guy offers us a complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, recorded in public at the Arsenal in Metz. This set is the first volume. ‘To play the complete Beethoven sonatas in public represents the most exhilarating project I have attempted, a tremendous artistic and human challenge. Beethoven explores sonic and poetic regions that in my view still remain, even in the early twenty-first century, his “exclusive territory”.’ François Frédéric Guy

Paul Lewis performed all the Beethoven piano sonatas on tour in the USA and Europe between 2005 and 2007 seasons, in parallel with his already acclaimed complete recording of the cycle for harmonia mundi. This is the third installment in the cycle that critics have predicted will become benchmark recordings.

13 pianists from around the world are presented on this 3 CD set, recorded live at the Ruhr Piano Festival in 2007. The first CD presents music by Beethoven including the Sonata No.4 in E flat minor and the Sonata No.10 in G major. The second CD is entitled ‘Haydn to Medtner’ and features music by Haydn, Schumann, Chopin and Medtner. And finally, CD No. 3 presents a collection of contemporary piano pieces by Chen Yi, Jan Muller-Wieland and Wolfgang Rihm. As always with this series there are some delightful surprises. A very enjoyable series.