This CD is reissued by ArkivMusic.
Notes and Editorial Reviews
I have never admired the Weber sonata so much, and the Brahms is played with superb artistry, virtuoso intelligence.
In his admirable note to this record, Alfred Brendel declares Weber's A flat Sonata to be ''almost forgotten''. He is right in so far as the work's stature is concerned, for that has been consistently ignored. A performance of this quality does much to recapture the sense of exploration, of new vistas being revealed, that Weber's contemporaries and immediate successors found in the work. Schumann, Chopin and Liszt would all have written differently without it; and part of the perception of Brendel's performance is that he suggests how the range of emotion, especially in the first movement, stirs a wealth
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of responses which were unknown at the time. His sense of structure is faultless (even if he contradicts himself by describing the C major climax as ''fatuous'' and then playing it so powerfully); this frees, rather than constrains, his fantasy, which is both poetic and whimsical, wry and witty, ferocious at the climax before turning back to the opening music (at 10'50'') now with an extra tinge of weariness and melancholy. He admits to some small adjustments to the text, which he has otherwise purged of the usual mistakes by going back to the first edition and the manuscript: some of the left-hand chords are beyond possibility except for someone of Weber's own huge hands and elongated thumbs (for pianist readers, try playing a chord of E flat/B flat/E flat/G). The beautiful Brodmann piano which Weber loved (and which is now in Berlin) would not have made this much easier.
The phrasing and textures of the Andante are marvellously unified, as they should be in music that seems to have orchestral implications; and Brendel has clearly thought carefully about the implications of the third movement's marking, Menuetto capriccioso: presto assai, for he takes it at hurtling speed but uses the pace to shape the single notes at the top of some of the fearful leaps into a graceful phrase (Liszt must have smiled at this). It is here, even more than in the finale, that Brendel's comparison with Hoffmann (as writer, clearly, not composer) has point. He plays the whole work as if spreading before his listeners a new world without letting go of the old. I have never admired the sonata so much.
Brendel's fantasy is at its sharpest particularly in the third of the Brahms Ballades; but the four are given their own proper romantic context, and played as relating to one another in a larger structure. This, too, is superb artistry, of virtuoso intelligence.
-- John Warrack, Gramophone
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Works on This Recording
1.
Ballades (4) for Piano, Op. 10 by Johannes Brahms
Performer:
Alfred Brendel (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1854; Germany
Date of Recording: 11/1989
Venue: Neumarkt, Oberpfalz, Germany
Length: 22 Minutes 41 Secs.
2.
Sonata for Piano no 2 in A flat major, J 199/Op. 39 by Carl Maria von Weber
Performer:
Alfred Brendel (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1816; Germany
Date of Recording: 11/1989
Venue: Neumarkt, Oberpfalz, Germany
Length: 30 Minutes 20 Secs.
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