Listening to Annie Fischer playing the "Hammerklavier" sonata via Tidal - breathtaking! Thanks so much for bringing her music to my attention...
I am not very familiar with flute virtuosos. For baroque music though, Franz Brueggen is unparalleled. He plays transverse flute and recorder. Anything he did, especially his work with Gustav Leonhardt, is a treasure. His playing on the Leonhardt Consort Brandenburg Concertos... wow! He has a languid and relaxed ease to his playing that is as organic as listening to the leaves rustle in a gentle breeze. For someone learning to play I could easily imagine that there would be a lot to absorb from him, even though he does not play a metal instrument.Nice write up, many thanks. I have very little knowledge of classical music so this really helps. Anyone have recommends on flute players/pieces that I should check out? My daughter has been playing for a few years now so I’d like to have some new things for us to listen to.
Really special Op. 109 for me. Weirdly he sort of rushes, even clips some of the phrases yet it still sounds divine and transcendental. The same continues through the rest of 109. His tone is also much more to my taste here with a rich burnished tone compared to the steeliness of his earlier recording. Not a fan of either recording of his in 110 and 111 didn't hit the same highs for me as the earlier recording. Lots of humming throughout
Really wonderful atmosphere around the recordings too, brilliantly mic'd by DG, loads of ambient information about the hall and plenty of direct sound.
Yeah it's live, this is why I complemented DG's engineers as there is virtually no audience noise (or maybe they paid the eye watering amount his tickets go for and decided to stay quiet!); it sounds like the mics are placed closer to the piano with the amount left hand weightiness I'm hearing. But at the same time enough reverberant information from the hall that I get a feel for the recording space that it's in. Pollini does play quite briskly and one reason 111 is not entirely to my taste is how he plays variation 4 and 5. Variation 3 is also a bit lacking in the real reckless abandonment but that is fine, Gulda or maybe Grinberg might be the only ones I've heard that truly relishes this section.
If this is unedited, and I am lead to believe it might be since there are a few extremely minor mistakes here and there, then Pollini still possess tremendous skill. I'd love to see him play this program live.
I like the recordings by Bruce Hungerford (he died before he complete his cycle).
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Beethoven-Piano-Various-artists/dp/B07BHDZL47/
(The Big Beethoven Piano box for $0.99!)
Heard all but three of the pianists mentioned in the original post play Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Agree 110% about Annie Fischer. Have the Schnabel, Arrau and Fischer cycles ripped from my CDs.
Murray Perahia's Beethoven was not particularly striking to these ears until I heard his Hammerklavier/Moonlight Sonatas recording that came out recently:
There's a degree of accuracy in Perahia's playing in the Hammerklavier that exceeds what I have heard from anyone else so far.
I find Sir András Schiff's ECM cycle is extraordinary set as well
Peter Serkin makes the fugal finale sound like a close relative of Bartok. Murray Perahia manages to cover more of the notes with greater note-accuracy than anyone else I've heard so far. Have to say, Sviatoslav Richter's Prague performance is a favorite for its brio and dynamics.I have changed my mind on the Schnabel since being able to hear the Pearl transfers, these are a lot clearer than the Naxos Historical transfers and you can more clearly hear his magnificent brio. I would now put Schnabel in my exceptional category and in sonatas like Pastoral I find him unequaled, I find he has that perfect eb and flow with his subtle use of rubato.
That Murray Perahia Hammerklavier was very well loved by Jed Distler. I'm a bit cooler on it, but no doubt it is excellent.
I enjoyed this masterclass he gave, he has great insight into interpreting it:
My overall number one pick is Peter Serkin on Pro-Arte, the recording he made on a Steinway not fortepiano.
Bought the Artur Schnabel Warner Classics complete Beethoven piano sonata set last week from Ebay, new for $25.00 with free shipping. Have been listening a lot to it since I got it. Manages to gleam on top but has very little surface noise. It's hard to imagine them sounding any better. Having cleaned up the sound this much seems to clean up the passagework a bit, but there are still performances that are messy. Certainly worth the $25.00.Peter Serkin makes the fugal finale sound like a close relative of Bartok. Murray Perahia manages to cover more of the notes with greater note-accuracy than anyone else I've heard so far. Have to say, Sviatoslav Richter's Prague performance is a favorite for its brio and dynamics.
I've owned [are you ready?] 5 different transfers of the Schnabel set*, heard the Angel and RCA LP transfers from the 1950's and 1960's [the EMI LP set from the 1980's had the best sound of the LP transfers]. The most recent transfers of Schnabel's Beethoven recordings from Warner Brothers are the best I've heard so far. Though there's plenty of digital noise filtering, there's a lot more going on in the upper registers than in the [previous] References EMI transfers, and as much going on in the upper registers as the Pearl transfers, but without the noise. The greater the clarity of the transfers of Schnabel, the greater the apparent note-accuracy of his playing. Agree about the "Pastorale". Many of his recordings of the earliest sonatas have an impact that no one [with the exception of Annie Fischer] has equaled. I've heard the Warner Brothers transfers via Amazon Music HD.
*Seraphim LP 1980's EMI UK LP, EMI References CD, Pearl CD and Naxos CD
I am not very familiar with flute virtuosos. For baroque music though, Franz Brueggen is unparalleled. He plays transverse flute and recorder. Anything he did, especially his work with Gustav Leonhardt, is a treasure. His playing on the Leonhardt Consort Brandenburg Concertos... wow! He has a languid and relaxed ease to his playing that is as organic as listening to the leaves rustle in a gentle breeze. For someone learning to play I could easily imagine that there would be a lot to absorb from him, even though he does not play a metal instrument.
His musical abilities do not stop at his flute playing. He is also a conductor, most notably with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. Here he tries for historic authenticity in every respect. I am not too keen on that effort though. Interesting... yes. But it often sounds a little too anemic.
Annie Fischer is much like what Schnabel would be like with modern sound and editing. I like what I've heard of Stephen Kovacevich (his old Philips recording of the Diabelli Variations is a favorite) but find the recorded sound of the EMI recordings too close up and hard. He certainly gets a lot of the notes in the Hammerklavier. I've also got the Claudio Arrau analog cycle, like it as much as the Schnabel set, albeit in different ways. I've also got the first Alfred Brendel cycle on Brilliant Classics in their big box of the complete Beethoven, have to get that off the shelf. The packaging is quite unwieldy. Lots of good things in the Brilliant Classics box, like the Guarani Quartet's second recording of the middle and late quartets or the Arthur Grumiaux/Clara Haskil set of the violin sonatas. I'm probably going to get the mono Kempff set in the near future. I've owned that set in a budget DGG box with excellent pressings, played that a lot.James Galway playing Bach and William Bennett playing Handel if you want modern flute playing.
I will be checking out Annie Fischer's Hugarotone. She has always been a favourite performer of mine.
Of the 2 complete cycles I have, Stephen Kovacevich's is the one to which I turn for both interpretation and recorded sound quality.
Elly Ney is perhaps my favourite for several Beethoven sonatas, sadly much maligned/unheard because of WWII, her Moonlight, 12 and Appassionata are superb. Arrau (on video) plays an excellent Moonlight sonata too.
It's a historically interesting subject. Wilhelm Kempff, Herbert von Karajan and Karl Bohm were all enthusiastic Nazis, it did not damage their post-war careers. Wilhelm Furtwängler was not enthusiastic, though he didn't put up much of a fight, but got into more trouble. And Wilhelm Mengelberg was shut out of his Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra post war. It seems that the closer the artists were to the center of these activities in Germany, the more likely they would not be punished. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.She was an enthusiastic Nazi and anti-Semite, if that's what you mean. Anyway, I don't object to people enjoying this sort of thing when the artist is long dead. I enjoy the music of Paul Graener, for example, who was a pretty good composer... and a long dead Nazi. But there's no need to try to rehabilitate the reputation of Nazis because we enjoy their music making.
I've seen much mention of this, but nothing beyond hearsay, so I'm interested to know what the sources are for it. It is not a case of rehabilitation, but of not repeating things others have said, just because it is the prevailing opinion.She was an enthusiastic Nazi and anti-Semite, if that's what you mean.
Almost all the 'more compliant' Soviet artists (Oistrakh, Kogan, Gilels et al) seemed to escape unscathed of any moral condemnation, yet that was an equally horrible regime. I'm not sure why that is, but there you go.It's a historically interesting subject. Wilhelm Kempff, Herbert von Karajan and Karl Bohm were all enthusiastic Nazis, it did not damage their post-war careers. Wilhelm Furtwängler was not enthusiastic, though he didn't put up much of a fight, but got into more trouble.