Customer Reviews

Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 2

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If you're looking at this page, you must already know that for many people and for seven decades, Schnabel's Beethoven Society recordings of the piano works have been the benchmark against which all others have subsequently been measured. These pioneering recordings have had many incarnations and currently here at www.Amazon.com alone one can find the complete set on Pearl, EMI and Classico d'Oro. Now Naxos is putting out their series, which will extend to nine volumes for the sonatas and two more for other piano works. Wizard recording producer Mark Obert-Thorn tracked down multiple sets of the rare 78 rpm discs in Britain, America and France and took the best he could find to make these new recordings. He got rid of things like pops and clicks while leaving in a soupçon of surface noise (even between movements - just like there would have been on the old 78s).

I needn't comment about the performances. Volumes have already been written about them. I suspect you're more interested in the sound quality. I've heard pressings from the Pearl and EMI sets. These new Naxos versions are superior to them, although the Pearls are a close second. And then there's the price. Can't be beat. Only one caveat: you may wish to wait until the whole set is complete and buy them in a boxed set.

Artur Schnabel's reputation as an interpreter of Beethoven's piano sonatas was second to none at the time these recordings were made in the 1930s. His admirers asserted that hearing him play them was like hearing Beethoven himself at the piano. His detractors cited several of Schnabel's mannerisms as reasons for dismissing claims of classic status, in particular Schnabel's tendency to "throw away lines" here and there in the manner of an actor, and his tendency to "rush his fences" whenever approaching technical difficulties in the manner of a nervous horse-rider.

Browsers will be able to respond in their own way, and at trifling cost, as they listen to this second CD in a Naxos reissue of Schnabel's Beethoven Sonata Society recordings. There are five sonatas here, and thanks to Mark Obert-Thorn's astonishingly good restoration work Schnabel's playing, occasional smudges and all, has amazing immediacy and presence. Browsers who are attracted to Schnabel's Beethoven should bear in mind that once Naxos has reissued all is Beethoven solo piano recordings on 11 CDs the complete series might become available as a boxed set.