The Complete 1950's Concerto Recordings [Box set]

Track Listings

1. Mozart: Piano Concerto K.450

2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 1 & 2

3. Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 3 & 5

4. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4

5. Schumann: Piano Concerto

Editorial Reviews
Album Details
Original Masters serie. 5 CD Box.

The Complete 1950's Concerto Recordings, Music, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Anatole Fistoulari, Franz Konwitschny, Josef Krips, Karl Munchinger, Paul van Kempen, Berliner Philharmoniker, Dresden Staatskapelle, London Symphony Orchestra, Members of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Wilhelm Kempff, Box Sets (Audio Only), Classical, Classical Artists, Classical Music, Concerto, Orchestral & Symphonic, Piano Concerto

Complete 1950's Concerto Recordings
Average customer rating:

Kempff is one of the Giants of the piano

The magical Kempff at his best

Great Beethoven, Redundant Release

Brilliant Recordings Rescued From The Vaults

Complete 1950's Concerto Recordings
Wilhelm Kempff
Manufacturer: Deutsche Grammophon
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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London Philharmonic Orchestra | ( L ) | Featured Performers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music
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The 1950s Haydn Symphonies Recordings

Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies

Schubert: The Piano Sonatas

Complete 1950s Solo Recordings

Igor Markevitch

ASIN: B00007BGXT
Release Date: 2003-02-11

Tracks:

Mozart: Piano Concerto K.450
Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 1 & 2
Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 3 & 5
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4
Schumann: Piano Concerto

Album Details

Original Masters serie. 5 CD Box.

Customer Reviews:

Kempff is one of the Giants of the piano.......2007-06-15

Not too much has been said about the sound quality of these discs.

I had not heard any of this music from the 50s until I came across this boxed set at Rhapsody. The early 50s are a sort of no man's land between the pre-hi fi historical recordings of the 20s to the late 40s and the great sounding hi fi analog stereo starting in the late 50s. So, is the sound OK on these discs? In a word, yes!

After listening to the almost overwhelming hiss sound on Gulda's piano sonatas from the same era (especially the first few discs), I almost passed on listening to this set. I would have missed out! There is some hiss, but it is certainly not overwhelming and maybe not even a tenth as bad as on the Gulda sonata discs. Kempffs recordings certainly do not rise to DDD standards level of today, but they are much better sounding than the historical recordings. While listening I easily was able to tune out the recording shortcomings and enjoy the music.

I enjoyed Kempff's playing on these discs and he has just about the perfect touch for the music.

The magical Kempff at his best.......2007-01-09

When I was young I was impatient with Mr. Kempff. I had his complete stereo version of the Beethoven piano concertos and sonatas on LP and I thought he was too limpid in my youth. I have since come to reappraise his artistry from a more mature perspective and even though he is not a heaven storming virtuoso, he more than makes up for it with the logic of his musicianship and the translucent sonority he gets from the instrument.

His early mono traversal of all 5 Beethoven Piano Concertos is included here and what a revelation it is! Wonderful performances. I have, as yet, to listen to his later stereo version to compare but I was bowled over by these interpretations. Full of passion and fire and complete with his own inventive (yet stylistically intact) cadenzas. This set is a joy.

The other concertos also display Kempff's seeming inexorable logic when it comes to elucidating the structure, both emotionally and architecturally, of the works. The Brahms is one of the most interesting interpretations I've ever heard, full of sturm and drang and also on the deliberate side when it comes to tempi (especially the coda in the last movement which is strangely satisfactory).

I am currently listening to the Schumann which is very poetic and I have as yet to listen to the 2 Liszt Concerti, but I'm sure they'll be fascinating.

Great Beethoven, Redundant Release.......2005-04-11

By far the most attractive items in this 5-disc set are the classic Beethoven concerto readings that Kempff recorded in the 1950's with Kempen and the Berlin Philharmonic. In my estimation, they comprise one of the two most completely satisfying integrales of these eternally-fresh works ever committed to disc (along with the worthy Schnabel/Sargent 1930's readings in lesser sound on Naxos & other labels).

While it's nice to re-visit Kempff's Mozart #9 and #15 with Munchinger, neither is really a match for Haskil/Ackermann (in #9 on M&A) or Solomon/Ackermann (in their #15 on Testament). Ackermann gives his soloists more supportive and better-played accompaniments than Munchinger's for Kempff. I never found Kempff to be a particularly illuminating Schumann player, and this Piano Concerto is pretty much an also-ran in a field that contains such superb accounts as Moiseiwitsch/Ackermann (Testament), Lipatti/Ansermet (Decca), Gieseking/Furtwangler (DG), and Gulda/Andreae (Decca). Unfortunately, the Brahms 1st Piano Concerto was well beyond Kempff's fingers by the 1950's, and Konwitschny is a rather prosaic partner (just compare this with Rubinstein/Reiner to hear what's lacking here). And, while perfectly satisfactory, Kempff's renditions of the Liszt concertos simply pale beside Sviatoslav Richter's (Philips).

The Beethoven concertos constitute the real draw here. But this is yet another example of how the classical CD collector today is faced with a flood of needlessly duplicated performances. These Beethoven concertos are ALREADY available as a 3-disc DG set (#435744), coupled with Kempff's really superb renditions of the lovely Op. 51 Rondos, which are sadly EXCLUDED here. Thus you can't simply buy this set and toss the earlier one without sacrificing some of Kempff's finest music-making. The corporate committee that came up with this dumb marketing idea needs to have its collective heads examined. Such muddled thinking reminds me of the old saying that the camel was a horse designed by a committee.

Magnificent Beethoven, but otherwise a rather mis-managed re-issue.

Brilliant Recordings Rescued From The Vaults.......2003-05-30

Now that Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, among others, are all part of Universal, we have seen some interesting things happen, and not all of them bad. What I'm referring to in this case is the new "Original Masters" Limited Edition Box Set series. Finally, the classical music world has taken a page out of the jazz reissue handbook -- put out a quality product featuring rare recordings but make its availability limited, and people will snatch it up. In the "Original Masters" series, first DG and now Decca have each reissued five box sets, of 4 to 7 CDs each, in distinguished, space-saving slim paper boxes, though the style of packaging is different. The DG sets feature 50s style graphics design on their covers, while the Decca ones have a distinctive rainbow/spectrum pattern on the spines and banners, and a black-and-white photo of the artist in question on the face of the box.

This particular set brings back Wilhelm Kempff's Complete Concerto Recordings from the 1950s for DG. There are some real gems here, including his first Beethoven PC Cycle with Paul Van Kempen and the Berlin Philharmonic, Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 9 & 15 with Karl Munchinger, Brahms' PC No. 1 with Franz Konwitschny, the Schumann with Josef Krips and the London Symphony, and both Liszt Concertos with Anatole Fistoulari and the LSO. I should mention that since all of the Concertos were recorded in the early 50s, they are all in mono, but still sound lovely. Well, I guess the consolidation of the music industry isn't so bad after all, as long as I can look forward to more reissues like this.

John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 4 (Pieces 1950-1960)

Average customer rating:

Hardcore Cage

John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 4 (Pieces 1950-1960)

Manufacturer: MD&G Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music

Classical | Imports | Stores | Music
ASIN: B00002R31B
Release Date: 2000-01-11

Tracks:

Winter Music
Arolsen, February 8, 1998
For M.C. And D.T.
For P. Taylor And A. Dencks
TV Koeln
Waiting
Seven Haiku: For Elsa
Seven Haiku: Merce Armitage
Seven Haiku: Aghavni Vomini
Seven Haiku: For Richard Lippold
Seven Haiku: For Maro
Seven Haiku: For Willem De Kooning
Seven Haiku: For Sonia Sekula
Haiku: For My Dear Friend, Who
Haiku: What Stillness
Haiku: The Green Frog's Voice
Haiku: The River Phurabelle
Haiku: [No Title]
Music Walk

Tracks:

Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
Solo
34 Minutes 46.776 Seconds

Customer Reviews:

Hardcore Cage.......2005-01-24

There are some wonderfully marvelous items on these Disks,more the Hardcore Cage period the Fifties streaming into the Sixties. The Fifties is when Cage discovered Zen and chance processes but also trapsed into areas of performance art, something he introduced the Europeans to, The 'Water Music' is a wonderfully inventive example. The piece is about 8 minutes and is performance art where a single pianist plays a radio(turns it off and on it is not continuous,plays abrupt chords on the keyboard(, blows three different whistles into a bowl of water, (duck, warbler, and penny whistle)then shuffles a deck of cards with the sustaine pedal down for resonance, and proceeds to deal the cards into the piano hitting the open exposed strings to marvelously ideterminate pointillistic actually pings,tings. The audience also looks on at the large seven foot score.

The 'Winter Music' as well,for one to twenty pianos I recall a story of a performance in Italy where the audience inhabits a typical European aristocratic courtyard at a music school, and the surrounding two tier buildings (in a rectangle) have pianos that creates a wonderful antiphonal effect. Here you cannot get that, the piece comes across with intense convolutions, and indeterminate-ness,the work is very difficult to listen to, each event is unto itself, not related to anything anytime, other than the here an now of what is known or was known.Zen.

TV KOLN is a graphic work where you the pianist has options to play other noises or timbres, or sounds, usually a radio is used, or the human voice.KOLN was the music center of the avant-garde in the Fifties continuing to today in many respects. You can also tap different parts of the piano box body, and it is up to the pianist performance to discovered the registers of the piano fully. "MusicWalk" is like "Water Music"only for a "travelling" pianist who must walk within the performance space to make noises elsewhere than center stage; you can use differing timbres.The pianist here uses his voice as his extended timbres.

The "Concert for Piano" and Orchestra was/is a seminal work, it is not really a "Concerto" it simply means musicians can co- inhabit a place to play together or not. The music is a virtual encylopedia of graphic notation processes, playing arpeggiations, horizontal and vertical distributions of tones, clusters, tremoli, rolls, also playing the piano's insides. The best way to play this and again only a live performance will give you the import of it, is like Bach or Xenakis, where you simply 'flip a switch', turn on the sound. playing as if there is no one else in the world. very provate. The result can be mysterious, magical,fascinating, disorienting, also boring and tedious, but mixtures of these gestures as well is part of this piece.

Much of the playing here seems much too much the same, I would think if you are going to ambitiously mount entire swabbs entire tomes of Cage's piano music that you bring a large spectrum of what the music can be and you introduce as much variety as possible.I would have liked to have more "theatre" for performance art was born here. The radio is a wonderful instrument.Also electronically altered,morphed timbre is perfectly allowable in this music,contact microphones would have brought another dimension to these works, and you then get outside the box of the stereo renderings of CD and there was none of that to be found. Here the readings are hardcore,there is no right or wrong, merely interesting and uninteresting.

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Music Review

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Fillmore East: The Lost Concert Tapes 12/13/68

1. Mozart: Piano Concerto K.450
2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 1 & 2
3. Beethoven: Piano Concerto Nos. 3 & 5
4. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4
5. Schumann: Piano Concerto