GREAT RECORDINGS phase 16

BEETHOVEN: Piano Concertos 1–5 · Choral Fantasia
Daniel Barenboim
John Alldis Choir · New Philharmonia Orchestra
Otto Klemperer

3 61525 2
(Angel: 3 61533 2) (3CDs)
Recorded 1967
Stereo/ADD
212 minutes

Back >>

‘This is the truest musical inspiration miraculously caught on the wing. One hesitates before describing any new recording of Beethoven as historic, but on any count this set is so. Barenboim and Klemperer, young and old in equal enthusiasm, bring a new revelation of the Beethoven concertos. I cannot think of another cycle that so consistently rivets the attention.’ (The Gramophone)

By the mid-1960s, the 80-year-old Otto Klemperer, greatest of all living Beethoven conductors, had recorded the nine symphonies, the Violin Concerto, Fidelio and the Missa solemnis, but not the piano concertos, which he had performed with legendary figures, including Schnabel, Arrau, Edwin Fischer and Wilhelm Backhaus.

In 1967 he recorded Mozart’s Concerto K503 with the twenty-four-year-old Daniel Barenboim, the prodigiously talented pianist and conductor, whose EMI recordings of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas were already taking the world by the ears. There was an immediate rapport between the two musicians, out of which came a set of the Beethoven concertos like no other the gramophone had yet given us.

The sessions in the autumn of 1967 were scheduled to cover only the first three concertos, yet such were their success that all involved went on to record, with the same sense of spontaneity and discovery, not only the remaining two concertos but also the Choral Fantasia, here at last afforded its true place and stature on record.