BEETHOVEN: PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5 "EMPEROR"

Description

German-born conductor Otto Klemperer, a towering figure in 20th-century music history, died aged 88 on 8 July 1973. 2023 will therefore mark the 50th anniversary of his death. His Warner Classics recordings are being made available for the first time in 2 separate box sets; the first volume, "Symphonic Works, Concertos & Lieder" (95CDs) will be released in June 2023. All recordings are remastered in HD 192/24 from original sources. In the mid-1960s, the 80-year-old Otto Klemperer had recorded all nine symphonies, the Violin Concerto, Fidelio and the Missa solemnis, but not the piano concertos that he had, during his career, performed with legendary figures such as Schnabel, Claudio Arrau, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Backhaus and the young Emil Gilels in Moscow in 1936. In 1967, he recorded Mozart's Concerto K503 with 24-year-old Daniel Barenboim, a pianist and conductor of prodigious talent, whose recordings of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas were already intoxicating ears around the world. There was an immediate relationship between the two musicians, from which a legendary cycle of Beethoven concertos emerged.