Beethoven 32, Vol. 1: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-3

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A long time ago, record companies would call upon the great Beethovenian musicians of the time to come and record their favourite works from his repertoire. Decca takes us back to this time with its re-release of two complete recordings of Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969) recorded in the early 1950s (monophonic), then for a second time between 1958 and 1968 (stereophonic). Over roughly the same period, Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) recorded two complete cycles of Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas between 1951 and 1956 (monophonic) and then from 1964-1965 (stereophonic). As the pinnacle of the piano repertoire, his work is now being performed by a great number of pianists to celebrate 2020, the year of Beethoven. In some cases, this required learning most of the sonatas and playing them for the first time, whereas the two seasoned experts cited above are examples of musicians that had practised and played Beethoven’s music in public for decades. Kempff was already recording practically the entire Beethovenian repertoire as early as the 1930s, at just forty years old! Do today’s pianists record these significantly complex works too soon (or, perhaps, for the wrong reasons)? Continuing in the same vein as musicians such as Igor Levit, Fazil Say, Martin Rasch, Martino Tirimo, Konstantin Lifschitz and Konstantin Scherbakov, who are more or less young, Boris Giltburg leaves this question unanswered. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/Qobuz