Richter Ensemble VIENNA 1905 - 1910

 

VIENNA 195 - 1910

Schumann Quartett CHIAROSCURO

CHIAROSCURO

Orchestre Nationa D'Auvergne / Roberto Forés Veses BERG - WEBERN - SCHREKER

                                                      BERG - WEBERN - SCHREKER

Mischa Maisky / Lily Maisky 20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

                                                         20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

Quatuor Arod THE MATHILDE ALBUM

With this album of works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern – key figures in Vienna’s musical life in the early 20th century – the Quatuor Arod honours the woman who became Arnold Schoenberg’s wife in 1901. Mathilde was Zemlinsky’s sister and the dedicatee of her husband’s String Quartet No 2, an innovative work in both its tonal language and its integration of a soprano – here Elsa Dreisig. It was completed in the summer of 1908, a tumultuous period in the Schoenbergs’ marriage.

Quatuor Modigliani PORTRAITS

Modigliani, one of the greatest portrait painters, is the inspiration for this journey made up of pieces with unique characters. Designed as a portrait gallery, this new opus brings together masterpieces and discoveries. The look or here the ear, linger on the curves, the lines, the singular melodic drawing of each of these partitions. Filigree is another portrait, that of the quartet.

Grupo Encuentros / Alicia Terzian 40 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

Since composer, conductor and musicologist Alicia Terzian founded Grupos Encuentros in 1978, the six-person group has garnered international acclaim for its success at bringing the music of avant-garde Argentinian and Latin American composers to the world. On 40 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, their debut recording for NAVONA RECORDS, the group combines compositions from such well-known Latin American composers as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, and Terzian herself with works by an international array of composers that ranges from Anton Webern (Germany) to Luciano Berio (Italy) to Franz Schreker (Austria) to Pierre Boulez (France).

Grupo Encuentros consists of mezzo soprano Marta Blanco, pianist Claudio Espector, flutist Fabio Mazzitelli, clarinetist Matias Tchicourel, violinist Sergio Polizzi and violoncellist Carlos Nozzi.  In this CD, saxophonist Maria Noel Luzzardo, oboist Ruben Albornoz, bassoonist Ernesto Imsand and percussionist Arauco Yepes join Encuentros Group. The program presented on 40 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC originally premiered at the annual Encuentros International Festivas in Buenos Aires and truly highlights the brilliance of these award-winning musicians, who have earned high praise from such media outlets as the Los Angeles Times, where they were lauded as “deeply serious and challenging.” Over their 40 year-long career, the group has performed in more than 300 concert halls and festivals of the main cities of five continents including London’s Royal Albert Hall and New York City’s Merkin Auditorium.

40 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC transcends cultural boundaries with such selections as Villa-Lobos’ Choro No 7, which unites the sounds of Amerindian primitivism with the polkas and waltzes of suburban dance halls in Brazil. Emphasizing her status as a renowned ethnomusicologist, Terzian dedicates her composition Yagua Ya Yuca to the Chiriguano and Chanel peoples, who belong to a lost indigenous northwestern Argentinian culture O King was composed the same year as the assassination of Martin Luther King, a tragedy which deeply affected its Italian composer Luciano Berio.

Grupo Encuentros founder Alicia Terzian has composed over 80 compositions for orchestras, orchestra with soloist, and chamber orchestras with and without soloists, musical theater, dance, and multimedia. She travels the world giving seminars on composition and contemporary chamber music at European and American universities and is often invited to participate on juries at international compositions.

Barbara Hannigan / Reinbert de Leeuw VIENNA FIN DE SIÈCLE

After the huge success of her GRAMMY Award-winning first album for Alpha, Crazy Girl Crazy, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is back with her longtime collaborator and mentor, the great figure of twentieth-century music, Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw.

For this new recital album, the duo explores the roots of modern music with composers who went on to lead a musical revolution: Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Wolf, Anton Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Alban Berg. Vienna: Fin de Siècle presents a vision of Vienna at the height of late Romanticism, when music was at its most lush and decadent, at the edge of tonality and full of voluptuous beauty. Featuring composers for whom text and song were inseparable, the album captures the rich and intense moment before the disruption of the harmonic language of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hannigan and de Leeuw have long championed the exquisite repertoire from this époque.

Jacob Greenberg HANGING GARDENS

Claude Debussy and the Second Viennese composers followed different paths of philosophical development, inspired by the trends of art and literature in their age, but they were aligned by a common embrace of sensuality in music. Theirs was a strongly shared language, and my interest as a pianist is to explore fields of intersection between these two musical worlds often thought to be opposite in character. Writing for the piano, an instrument equally wide-ranging and intimate, helped all these composers to explore decadent dimensions of harmony, form, and sound color.

For this recording, Debussy’s two books of Préludes and selected individual pieces offer a chance to view the music of Arnold Schoenberg’s school, assumed to be arid and formalist, through a tinted lens. The Préludes, influenced by otherworldly Symbolist poetry and the aesthetic of ancient classical art, give snapshots of places, objects, natural phenomena, and fleeting moods. Small musical forms bely the ambition of Debussy’s endeavor: he conjures minutely detailed scenes, each of the twenty-four pieces wholly distinct in feeling.

Both Schoenberg and Anton Webern thrive in similarly miniature constructions. Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens portrays a doomed, desperate romance in brief tableaus set in a mythic, lush landscape. Featuring some of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces, the cycle is energized by its intentional instability. Its richly ambiguous harmonic language is well-matched to Stefan George’s poetry of emotions stretched to the breaking point. The heightened poetic sensitivity is reflected in the composer’s tactile approach to sound: this can be heard especially in number 11 of the set, which depicts the lovers touching each other lightly in the afterglow of passion. This movement can be compared to the exotic flirtation of Debussy’s Voiles, and the heat of La puerta del vino.

Alban Berg’s whole-tone patterns in his early Sonata draw a clear link to Debussy. The innovative, pervasive development of a simple motive leads Berg to coloristic extremes. And Webern’s Variations finds expressive continuity and intense energy in spare sounds or silence. Webern forges a totally original piano texture: notes become points of light, forming shapes in a gorgeous void. Debussy and the Second Viennese opened music to a sensual, seductive unreality that diverse composers, to our own age, have accepted as a promise of possibility. ( Jacob Greenberg)

Matt Haimovitz / Philippe Cassard PORTES OUVERTES

Matt Haimovitz’s latest recital of twentieth-century cello compositions sustains the thesis of its predecessors (12/95 and 5/97) that extreme contrast, not merely variety, has been the spice of twentieth-century musical life. To juxtapose two works from 1914, Reger’s Third Suite and Webern’s Three Little Pieces, the former expansive and retrospective, the latter aphoristic and reaching nervously into an unknowable future, makes the point with admirable immediacy.

The rest of the music here is more mainstream, the Britten Sonata showing that there was as much mileage left in the old classical genres in 1960 as Debussy had found in his Sonata more than 40 years before. With these works, of course, Haimowitz is competing against a long series of distinguished predecessors on disc, and his partnership with Cassard (how often have they played these works in concert, I wonder?) can’t match the empathy of Moray Welsh and John Lenehan in the Britten, or – it goes without saying – of Rostropovich and Britten himself in both sonatas.

The recording as such is at its best in the unaccompanied works, its closeness and resonance reinforcing the powerful musical profile of Dutilleux’s elegant yet forceful Strophes, and helping to ensure that Reger does not seriously outstay his welcome. In Webern, Debussy and Britten the piano sound has an abrasive aspect to it, as if the object were to underline the incompatibility of two such different instruments. But the playing is technically first-rate, and should certainly open doors (why the French title?) to anyone exploring this repertory for the first time.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)

Rosamunde Quartett ANTON WEBERN - DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH - EMIL FRANTISEK BURIAN

The German-Austrian-Australian Rosamunde Quartett München was formed in 1991 by four musicians of widely differing backgrounds, and given early encouragement by Sergiu Celibedache and Heinrich Schiff. A major success at the Berliner Festwochen a year later elevated them to 'the elite of the lofty guild of string quartets' to quote one German critic, and since then they have toured the major festivals. The undervalued work of Czech composer Burian has been one of the quartet's enthusiasms from the outset. Here they contrast his 4th String Quartet with Shostakovich's 8th - in the process alluding to the troubled biographies of both men - in a programme that begins with Webern's farewell to Romanticism in the Langsamer Satz.

'One of the finest discs to come from ECM of late by the little-known but distinguished Rosamunde Quartet. The Webern dates from his short-live Romantic period, in style close to late Strauss or Schoenberg of Verklärte Nacht. Shostakovich's elegiac String Quartet No. 8, dedicated to 'the victims of fascism and war', glints with irony and self-reference, while the Czech Burian manages to be at once sinister and dreamy.'  (Fiona Maddocks, The Observer)

Novus Quartet 3 # 1 Webern - Beethoven - Yun

From the first note showed the Novus String Quartet mature musicality and sensitivity both in the formation of the ensemble sound." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

"This ensemble's playing is incredibly solid and well-balanced. All four musicians perform at the same level and their music-making is enthralling." (Lukas Hagen)

It was with these words that Lukas Hagen, first violinist of the renowned Hagen Quartett, described the four musicians' artistic quality after their performance at the International Mozart Competition, held in Salzburg in February 2014, where Hagen was the Head of the Jury. The quartet went on to win First Prize at the Competition.

Established at the Korean National University of Arts in 2007, the Novus String Quartet is one of the leading chamber music ensembles in Korea.

Since the quartet’s triumph at the prestigious ARD International Chamber Music Competition in Munich in 2012, where it was awarded Second Prize, the Novus String Quartet has gained steady recognition in Europe. In February 2014, the four Koreans won First Prize at the Mozart String Quartet Competition, chaired by Lukas Hagen of the Hagen Quartett, in Salzburg.

One year after its founding, the quartet celebrated inaugural success at the International Chamber Music Competition Osaka, where the musicians were awarded Third Prize, the same prize they received in 2009 at the Chamber Music Competition in Lyon and 2012 at the International Haydn Chamber Music Competition in Vienna.

In 2010, the quartet was the first chamber music ensemble to be featured on the list of promising musicians of the year by the music magazine Auditorium. Since then, the quartet has performed concerts internationally, lauded by audiences and critics alike.

The Novus String Quartet studies under Professors Christoph Poppen and Hariolf Schlichtig at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich.

In 2013, the Novus String Quartet’s international engagements took them to the Haydn Music Festival, Salle Molière in Lyon, Chamber Music Hall in Berlin’s Philharmonie, Schwetzinger Festspiele and the Carnegie Hall in New York. The quartet’s South American tour, as part of the Credomatic International Music Festival, featured highly acclaimed concerts in such cities as El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama.

Pierre Boulez WEBERN Complete Works

The complete recording of Anton Webern's output just released by Deutsche Grammophon does very much more than refute old and sterile arguments against serialism. But that it does, and overwhelmingly. Webern -- always a close observer of his teacher Schoenberg, though, as an essentially lyrical composer, thoroughly independent -- took up Schoenberg's new serial technique in 1924 and never looked back. For the rest of his life, 21 years, he went on delighting in the opportunities serialism presented for making patterns: patterns like those of the snowflakes, flowers and crystals he admired in the Austrian mountains, patterns that would support his music's exquisite strains of melody and be supported by them.

He was making patterns with the past, too. Serialism reinvigorated for him the standard forms, especially variations and canon. And it brought him closer to the old masters. Starting with his Symphony (1927-28), most of his movements are canons of one kind or another, often allowing an expressive gesture to be answered, balanced and pinpointed by a copy moving in the other direction, a lift by a sigh, along the course of a regularly waving rhythm.

Canonic and variation forms were also outcomes of a quest for integration, for creating music in which a motif of three or four notes would be constantly present in different colorings, registrations and rhythmic placements. Hence the paradox that the music feels, expressively, so fragile that it might fall apart if one put a finger on it and yet, structurally, it is tightly made and reinforced in every direction. It is at once tender and tough.

As for links with predecessors, that same symphony, although it has just two movements, is scored for chamber orchestra and lasts less than 10 minutes, has something of the grand melodic sweep Webern admired in Bruckner. The concerto that came soon after is a modern ''Brandenburg,'' and Bach is invoked again in the two cantatas on spiritual themes that came near the end of Webern's life.

At the same time, Webern outfaced his nostalgia by resolute adherence to the new means he had devised for himself, with cues from Schoenberg, and by steady exploration of their possibilities. He never worried that his music, in essential respects, sounded quite unlike anything that had come before or was being written around him. He just went on, with exemplary persistence. He had no way of knowing that the vacuum in which he worked would rapidly be filled after his death, not least by Stravinsky, who learned a lot from his music in the 1950's, but also by many younger composers.

Among the eager Webernians then was Pierre Boulez, who returns to be the mastermind of the new recordings, just as he was 30 years ago for a set made by CBS, now available on CD from Sony Classical. But there are differences. One is that the new box (Deutsche Grammophon 457 637-2; six CD's) is twice as large, including many works Webern withheld from publication.

Some of these are juvenilia, imparting the unsurprising news that the composer at 16 was a talented, hopeful, somewhat incompetent beginner. His later rejects, though, include wonderful pieces, especially among the songs and instrumental movements he wrote in 1913 and 1914. During that period he gave thought to a sequence of orchestral pieces, some with solo soprano, rather in the manner of a distilled Mahler symphony. There might have been a similar string quartet with voice. Much later, though, Webern decided to issue sets of purely instrumental movements: the Six Bagatelles (Op. 9) for string quartet and the Five Pieces (Op. 10) for orchestra.

This left out of account not only the song movements -- two with orchestra and the one with quartet are breathtaking -- but also quite a number of orchestral movements. Mr. Boulez includes five, and two extra bagatelles.

A CD player can be programmed to present, say, Opus 9 followed by the two unselected bagatelles and, to end, the song with quartet, which not only provides a passionate slow finale but also leaves a clue to the music's expressive core, in a sense of grief and loss. Similarly, one can reconstruct a vocal symphony, which would have to include an alarming brassy piece (No. 3 among the additional orchestral movements) and the magical setting of a Stefan George poem, with its delicious spot for voice and percussion, and its penultimate gesture of a huge rise from the singer on the word ''holy.''

These and many other pieces sound, here, marvelous to perform. All the string quartets and trios are played by the Emerson String Quartet, which, strong and expressive, makes every little miniature sound big. Nearly all the songs, and the soprano parts in the cantatas, are sung by Christiane Oelze, for whom the music seems to have been waiting. Defying gravity, Ms. Oelze moves with ease through the enormous pitch intervals Webern loved and makes them beautiful and true, keen points in the continuing phrase and markers of exaltation or anguish.

Her contributions include, happily, all the songs with piano, which again embrace remarkable items Webern did not publish: the Five Dehmel Lieder of 1906-8, right on the bright moonlit borders of atonality; and 4 George songs from the next year, in addition to the 10 published as Opuses 3 and 4. Webern changed his mind about the planning of these cycles, eventually deciding that each should have an introduction followed by four songs in which the singing persona's feelings are reflected in nature (Op. 3) or in a tragic relationship (Op. 4). The numbers thus omitted are well worth hearing, especially when sung so well -- and played so well, by Eric Schneider.

Among other exceptional pianists at work here are Pierre-Laurent Aimard, in the quartet with saxophone and the concerto, and Krystian Zimerman, in the Variations (Op. 27) and two other pieces. Mr. Zimerman gives a beautiful account of the variations: the finale, highly effective, has wide-spanning melodies, often violent and gentle in the same breath, searching in a musical space that comes to be defined by chord resonances in the background.

But of course the performer who figures most prominently and comprehensively is Mr. Boulez, as conductor. To an astonishing degree, his tempos are close to those of his earlier recordings. Yet consistency of timing is deceptive, for within identical spans a lot has changed. Mr. Boulez is working here with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Ensemble Intercontemporain: musicians who have a much fuller appreciation than anyone did three decades ago of Webern's flow, dependent on subtle phrasing and a chamber-musical responsiveness of one player or section to another.

Where, for instance, the arrangement Webern made of the six-part ricercar from Bach's ''Musical Offering'' almost fell apart in the 1969 London Symphony recording, the new version is secure and even imposing. The earlier performances of the original works often sound scrappy and preliminary, and though the first clarinet in the symphony achieves some suavity in rather torn textures, the same part emerges in the later recording far more gorgeous and sensitive.

Inevitably, there are losses as well. The spikiness Mr. Boulez found in this repertory when he was in his mid-40's was not just a result of unconsidered playing: it came from a conviction that the music was fierce and that it mattered. Witness, for example, the swing between aggressiveness and recuperation in the second movement of the symphony, or the way the choral women in the third movement of the Second Cantata seem to sing with teeth bared, like Valkyries. These moments are more beautiful in the later recordings but not necessarily more exciting.

There are also performances in the earlier set that will not be supplanted, like the account of the two Rilke poems, with Heather Harper, or the many appearances of another soprano, Halina Lukomska, whose flaming voice is so different from Ms. Oelze's but equally apt.

Something else has happened to Webern during the last three decades: we know far more about his life, and about his opinions, which were not all edifying. His pursuit of purity in his music -- of complete homogeneity and integration, of absolute precision in the minutest detail -- and the high value he placed on German culture led him, crazily and dismayingly, to consider that his ideals were shared by the Third Reich.

He was not an anti-Semite. Indeed, he helped conceal Jews in Vienna. But he seems to have thought that Hitler was some kind of agent of spiritual regeneration, and that the spreading Nazi conquests of 1939 to 1941 were all to the benefit of the nations overcome: this even though the annexation of Austria in 1938 had put an end to his activity as a conductor and to any hopes he had of hearing his music again, other than in neutral Switzerland. The Nazis closed his public career. And yet, privately, he applauded them.

Knowing this, we might want to listen to the Variations for orchestra of 1940 a little more carefully and a little more critically: to pay less attention, perhaps, to the coherence and symmetry the music so ostentatiously exhibits than to the delicacy, strangeness and variety of its component parts, and even to insist, contra Webern, on multiplicity and ambiguity as essential elements in his art.

More useful, too, than dismissing him for his foolish views would be to learn from his example of magnificent but, in crucial respects, misaligned idealism. Snowflakes and flowers are all very well, and we need them, but their rules arCDe not those of politics. (Paul Griffiths / The New York Times)

CD 1 / CD 2 / CD 3 / CD 4 / CD 5 / CD 6

Thomas Demenga / Thomas Larcher / Teodoro Anzellotti CHONGURI

Cellist Thomas Demenga offers up a colorful program of encores in Chonguri. From the pizzicato tour de force of the title piece by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, which imitates the selfsame four-stringed instrument of the composer’s native Georgia, it’s clear we’re in for a lively and eclectic treat. Pianist Thomas Larcher accompanies Demenga for most of the program, which includes nods to the familiar and not so. Of the latter, Catalonian composer Gaspar Cassadó’s Danse du diable vert is among the more spirited pins in the album’s geographic and chronographic spread. Two Chopin nocturnes give us a taste of home, in a manner of speaking, with the c-sharp minor presented to us in one of the more beautiful arrangements one is likely to find (though I’ll always be partial to Bela Banfalvi’s). The balance here is superb. A dash of Webern keeps us on our toes, his three Little Pieces sparkling with a charm that is, I daresay, romantic. Of romance we get plenty more in the three Fauré selections sprinkled throughout, of which Après un rêve is a highlight, and in Liszt’s evocative La lugubre gondola.

Four Bach chorales, in Demenga’s arrangements, for which he is joined by accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti form the album’s roof.Sounding somewhere between an organ and a hurdy-gurdy, the sheer depth of tone from Demenga’s cello in these is inspiring.He also offers two pieces of his own, of which the programmatic New York Honk is a delightful end.

Demenga’s playing is such that one can feel the lineage that binds all of this music together into a masterful patchwork as idiosyncratic as it is (seemingly) inevitable. Such programming epitomizes the ECM New Series spirit insofar as it charts the contemporary while paying due respect to the antique in what amounts to one of Demenga’s finest recordings to date and a label landmark. (ECM Reviews)

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Lambert Orkis PROKOFIEV - CRUMB - WEBERN - RESPIGHI Recital 2000 (CD 23 / ASM35)

This is a live recording, made at a pair of concerts in May, and ‘live’ is undoubtedly the word for it. All the performances have an improvisatory quality, interpretative decisions seemingly made before your very ears. At the beginning of the Prokofiev it is as though Mutter and Orkis, realising that the audience in the Beethovensaal are already uncommonly silent and attentive, had decided after a quick glance at each other to begin the Sonata almost confidingly, with quiet tenderness and muted colour. Once or twice they take risks: the third and most epigrammatic of the Webern pieces is played with a mere thread of tone; in the hall it must have approached the limits of audibility. But this approach powerfully distils the intimate but intense emotions of these pieces; there is something close to pain in the second of them.
Once in a while the risks show. Not long after the opening of the Prokofiev there is an abrupt, stabbed accent that you suspect Mutter would have had second thoughts about in a studio recording, and an equally sudden expressive scoop in the slow movement – hauntingly poignant as she phrases and colours it – robs her intonation of its purity for a moment. There are similar but less hazardous extremes in the big gestures and expansive palette of the Respighi; fewer in George Crumb’s evocative, post-Bartokian Nocturnes, with their striking use of plucked, brushed or drummed piano strings. Throughout the recital Mutter’s playing is nervously intense, emotionally searching, and you are bound to refer this to the fact that she dedicates the disc to the memory of her husband, who died five years ago. It is vulnerable music-making, not always comfortable, but deeply expressive and often moving. The recording is spacious, the audience hushed.' (Gramophone)

Maurizio Pollini 20th CENTURY

Maurizio Pollini was born in Milan on 5 January 1942. His father was the famous architect Gino Pollini, one of the leading representatives of Italian rationalism and also an expert violinist. His mother, Renata Melotti, studied piano and singing and was the sister of the well-known sculptor Fausto Melotti, who had a lasting influence on the young Pollini. In 1948 Maurizio Pollini received his first piano lessons from Carlo Lonati. From 1955 until 1959 he continued his studies with Carlo Vidusso and in 1958 he began to study composition with Bruno Bettinelli. In 1960 he was awarded first prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw and appeared at La Scala playing Chopin’s First Piano Concerto under Celibidache. Since then Pollini has become one of the most admired and respected pianists of our time and has appeared all over the world with leading orchestras and conductors. He is particularly renowned for his innovative concert programmes which champion works by contemporary composers and contrasts these with those of the Classical and Romantic eras. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist for four decades, his recordings have won innumerable awards, including Gramophone and Echo Awards, Diapason d’or, Record Academy Prize, Tokyo, and Stella d’oro as well as two Grammys.

 

More than any other leading pianist of the second half of the 20th century, Maurizio Pollini has made a point of championing radical new music. One of his principal aims in life has been to introduce new audiences to works by Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen and Sciarrino. Passionately opposed to the idea that art is a meditative medium conducive to rapt contemplation, he prefers to offer his audiences the sort of programmes whose fare is regarded by many as unpalatable or at least as taxing. The first new work he performed was Giorgio Federico Ghedini's masterly Fantasia for piano and strings, which he premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 11 October 1958 under the direction of Thomas Schippers. During the following decades he made a name for himself as a technically impeccable performer with rare powers of objective analysis and a remarkably cultured tone in a repertory extending from Bach, Beethoven and the Romantics to the most modern works. Since the 1990s he has appeared at every major music festival performing programmes of new works that he himself has planned in the form of special projects. Among the awards he has received in consequence are the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

From the outset of his recording career, Maurizio Pollini has championed modern music - in benchmark accounts of Bartok, Boulez, Manzoni, Nono, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern, to which can be added his later recordings of Debussy and Berg. Here are his complete recordings of 20th-century music, brought together on a 6-CD set for the first time.

CD 1
STRAVINSKY: Three Movements from Petrushka
PROKOFIEV: Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83
WEBERN: Variations for piano, Op. 27
BOULEZ: Piano Sonata No. 2
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 2
NONO: Como una ola de fuerza y luz for soprano, piano, orchestra and tape
Slavka Taskova, soprano
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Claudio Abbado
.....sofferte onde serene... for piano and magnetic tape dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini
Maurizio Pollini, piano
MANZONI: Masse: Omaggio a Edgard Varese for piano and orchestra
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Giuseppe Sinopoli
Live recording

CD 3
SCHOENBERG
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11
Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19
Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23
Suite for Piano, Op. 25
Piano Piece, Op. 33a
Piano Piece, Op. 33b
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 42
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Claudio Abbado

CD 4
BARTOK
Piano Concerto No. 1 Sz 83
Piano Concerto No. 2 Sz 95
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Claudio Abbado

CD 5
DEBUSSY: 12 Etudes
BERG: Sonata for Piano, Op. 1
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 6
DEBUSSY:
Preludes
L'Isle joyeuse
Maurizio Pollini, piano