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Brahms: Complete Piano Music, Vol 2 - Rittner

Brahms: Complete Piano Music, Vol 2 - Rittner

MDG Scene  904 1538-6

Stereo/Multichannel Hybrid

Classical - Instrumental


Brahms: Piano Sonatas Op. 1 & 5

Hardy Rittner (piano)


Bravura Debut
With his first Brahms volume Hardy Rittner made the music world sit up and listen and met with positive international resonance. “I have never heard these works on a fortepiano – and I have never heard them so intensively” (musicweb). Now the highly gifted young pianist is presenting his second recording – once again on a previously undocumented, magnificently restored Bösendorfer grand piano from 1849-50 made available to him by the Viennese
collector Gert Hecher.

Grand Piano
Brahms once wrote in a letter, “I do not like to set a program without having gotten to know the hall and, mainly, the grand piano.” It is also just as certain that he thought very highly of the 235-centimeter grand piano by the Viennese piano builder Ignaz Bösendorfer produced two years before. The use of grand pianos lending tonal support to the particular keyboard repertoire thus makes perfect sense in the context of nineteenth-century music.

Symmetrical Structure
Brahms had written, rejected, and systematically destroyed countless songs, piano compositions, and string quartets before he presented himself to the public with his op. 1. He very deliberately established contacts with Beethoven: in one passage an allusion to the Hammerklavier Sonata is audible; in another connections to the Waldstein Sonata can be recognized. In his Sonata in F minor op. 5 Brahms developed the five-movement symmetrical sonata form that Béla Bartók would later appropriate for himself and his bridge form. Just prior to the conclusion the motto F-A-E (Frei Aber Einsam, Free But Lonely) that would continue to be of importance to Brahms throughout his life is heard for the first time. And reminiscences of the Deutschlandlied may be intended as a signal of his hopes for a united democratic fatherland.

Musical Masterpiece
On this recording Hardy Rittner demonstrates that he already belongs “to the world top class of pianists“ (Frankfurter Rundschau). His seemingly effortless mastery of the difficulties of playing technique posed by the Viennese action, together with his extraordinarily fine sense of sound and unbridled performance pleasure, is stunning.

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Review by John Broggio - January 7, 2009

As in Brahms: Complete Piano Music, Vol 1 - Hardy Rittner, Rittner plays with inspiration.

This second volume pairs the first and third sonatas, so now we have the complete sonatas in period performances. Instead of the Johann Baptist Streicher, an 1849/50 Bösendorfer is employed and gives a certain extra element of brightness, weight and tonal depth without sacrificing anything of the clarity that period instruments tend to bring to the proceedings.

It is often said that Brahms was late in writing a symphony but Rittner's playing shows that to be false; these works are symphonic in scope and scale - all that was left was for Brahms to produce an orchestration. Apart from capturing the grand sweep of the phrases and the structure of the compositions, Rittner also delivers on the poetry of the music. No detail escapes his attention but neither does it interrupt the musical narrative. The Scherzo movements of each sonata have a nice Viennese lilt to them and the slower movements a tender eloquence. The Finale's are dazzling in their virtuosity yet Rittner's playing is fully at the service of the music, not his self-aggrandisement.

The recording from MDG, again a 2+2+2 production, is as clear and rounded as that in volume 1.

Very highly recommended and one looks forward to future volumes.

Copyright © 2009 John Broggio and HRAudio.net

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