GREAT RECORDINGS phase 14

BEETHOVEN: PIANO CONCERTOS
Nos. 4 & 5 ‘Emperor’
Emil Gilels
Philharmonia Orchestra/Leopold Ludwig

4 76828 2
(Angel: 4 76829 2)
Recorded 1957
Stereo/ADD
73 minutes

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‘This Beethoven Fourth is one of the most perfect accounts (and perhaps the most perfect account) of the Concerto ever recorded. Poetry and virtuosity are held in perfect poise, with Ludwig and the Philharmonia providing near-ideal accompaniment. Gilels’s Emperor is also a masterful and compelling performance.’ (Gramophone)

Emil Gilels, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, was born in Odessa in 1916, where he began to learn the piano and, at the age of 12, gave his first recital. In 1931, Artur Rubinstein, on a tour in Russia, heard Gilels and declared that if the young Russian ever came to America he, Rubinstein, would have to pack his bags. A quarter of a century later Gilels did indeed travel to the West and took the US and Europe by storm.

Gilels’s teacher in Moscow during the late 1930s was the renowned Heinrich Neuhaus, whose pupils also included another Russian giant of the keyboard Sviatoslav Richter, with whom later Gilels was forced into an uneasy rivalry. In truth the two pianists were very different artists, with Richter the far more mercurial and unpredictable. Gilels meanwhile developed from a ‘dynamic, titanic figure’ (the proverbial virtuoso) into an artist able to ‘mediate with ease between intellect and emotion’.

Though Gilels recorded extensively, EMI’s opportunities to work with this great artist were sadly few. However, the records he did make for the company include some of the most admired of his studio recordings of the Romantic and Classical repertoire in which he excelled. The early stereo recordings of Beethoven’s last two piano concertos, made in London in 1957 with the Austrian conductor Leopold Ludwig and Walter Legge’s superb Philharmonia Orchestra, are considered to be among Gilels’s finest contributions to the gramophone.