NEWS NOTES
Igor Levit teams up with Christian Thielemann Igor Levit has recorded the two Brahms piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Christian Thielemann, which will be released by Sony Classical on 4 October and will be reviewed in the next issue. Levit and Thielemann first performed together in 2015 – when Levit stood in for an indisposed colleague to play Mozart’s C major Concerto, K467, with the Staatskapelle Dresden in Munich – and have since further developed a strong musical connection. During a walk together near Berlin the conversation turned to Brahms, and they conceived the plan to record the two piano concertos as part of an upcoming Brahms cycle with Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Thielemann commented: ‘I ’ve always been fascinated by how this orchestra can react to conductors and assimilate even the smallest details. And then there is the concert hall, the Wiener Musikverein, with its acoustic properties that Brahms knew so well.’ Levit adds: ‘And what a sound! I was sitting in the first rehearsal and the horn began to play. You do not really want to start playing, but rather to say to the hornist: Can you please play that again? It was so beautiful.’ For the same album, Levit has also recorded Brahms’s late pieces, Opp 116-119, which he has been playing in concert to widespread acclaim. The programme finishes with Levit and Thielemann playing a four-hand rendition of Brahms’s Waltz, Op 39 No 15.
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Forthcoming piano box-sets Eloquence is releasing two ‘Piano Library’ box-sets – a 21-disc ‘Westminster & American Decca Edition’ and a 22-disc ‘Deutsche Grammophon Edition’. The contents are fascinating, including many pianists who have since faded from the limelight, others caught in the early stages of glittering careers, and some little-known gems that never secured a lasting place in the catalogue.
Spanning 1950 to 1963, the recordings in the Westminster and American Decca set document the end of some distinguished careers (notably Benno Moiseiwitsch and Egon Petri) and the early flourishing of others, such as Jörg Demus and Nina Milkina. It includes the four solo LPs for Westminster recorded in 1956 by Raymond Lewenthal, which marked his return to the studio after an assault that had left him unable to play for several years. Also included are the August 1961 New York sessions of Benno Moiseiwitsch (Beethoven, Schumann and Mussorgsky) and a first-time CD release of Egon Petri’s Moonlight Sonata, alongside its original LP couplings of the Pathétique and Appassionata, plus the Hammerklavier and Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica from the same sessions in June 1956. There is also the first publication of a major archival discovery – 1951 recordings of three Chopin Mazurkas by Youra Guller. The ‘Deutsche Grammophon Edition’ features 20 hours of recordings made between 1951 and 1980. Vladimir Ashkenazy’s live performances from the 1955 Queen Elisabeth Competition – issued on DG, before he signed for Decca – are included, as is a Rachmaninov selection by Ashkenazy’s teacher, Lev Oborin. There are recordings from the ‘Concours’ and ‘Debut’ sub-labels on DG, which launched an array of pianists including Boris Bloch, Youri Egorov, Steven De Groote and Zola Mae Shaulis. At the other end of the spectrum, this box also reissues
Beethoven sonata recordings made by Elly Ney at the end of her long career. Both sets will be reviewed in the next issue of International Piano.
In November a 26-disc box-set of the complete recordings for Decca by Jorge Bolet will be released. As well as all of Bolet’s previously issued Decca recordings, this set will also include a disc of Chopin (a selection of nocturnes and the Berceuse) that the pianist recorded in Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on 23 and 24 February 1990, eight months before he died, which were edited but never released. In the next issue we present a feature on Jorge Bolet, placing his Decca legacy in the context of his career as a whole.
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