Arrau With Szell: Live From Carnegie Hall

Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Arrau, piano & George Szell, conductor

Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 15 (11 November 1945); Chopin - Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 (9 January 1955); Richard Strauss - Burleske in D minor for Piano & Orchestra (11 March 1945); Weber - Konzertstück in F minor for Piano & Orchestra, Op. 79 (11 March 1945) Liszt - Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major (15 December 1946)

Appearing for the first time in any format, the live collaborations between Claudio Arrau and George Szell released on these CDs stem from wellpreserved and carefully restored broadcast transcription discs. One might not automatically pair such seemingly antipodal artists in concertos, yet Arrauand Szell shared numerous points in common. Both were child piano prodigies, who spent their formative years in post-World War I Berlin, and eventuallysettled in the United States as refugees during World War II. Arrau and Szell were literalists and detail-oriented interpreters for whom every noten a score had to be accounted for. But while Szell¹s exacting, regimented standards closely reflected Toscanini's aesthetic, Arrau channeled hisconsiderable resources towards the heightened expression and rhetorical freedom he admired in Furtwängler's conducting and Busoni's piano playing. Both artists recorded for American Columbia in the late 1940s, yet, for whatever reasons, never collaborated in the studio. That said, Arrau andSzell tended to live more dangerously in front of audiences, and the present performances find conductor and soloist spurring each other on to palpable edge-of-seat levels of dynamism, daring and volatility.

Price: $42.98

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