00:00 - I. Maestoso
24:12 - II. Adagio
40:00 - III. Rondo: Allegro non troppo
Recorded: 1969 October. Amsterdam.
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Decca – 478 2365
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Brahms Piano Concerto 1
Author: Richard Osborne / Excerpts from the article

"The D minor Concerto has often cast a special spell over its interpreters. The late Glenn Gould suggested that with all its architectural deficiencies it is the most intriguing of Brahms's orchestral scores and went on to argue that it could be approached either as a romantic concerto full of high drama, contrasts, angularities and inequalities (a work with ''a lot of surprises, a moral position full of contradictions'') or as an altogether more cogent piece, ''a sophisticated weaving of a fundamental motivic strand'' that Schoenberg would have looked at with absorbing interest."

"No one, I trust, will deny that Arrau has lived with, wrestled with, and in a truly terribly way 'known' the D minor Concerto for more years than most of us can consciously recall. where contemporary pianists have often tended to refine or domesticate the concerto, withdrawing it from the world of heroic endeavour, Arrau has always done the reverse. No pianist, apart possibly from Serkin in his several recordings, has communicated so formidably the work's scope: its seriousness and its anxious, tragic mood. Often Arrau makes free with the text. It is an uncomfortable reading to meet. But the vision is huge, the technique astonishing. Haitink is a worthy accompanist. Jochom would have met Arrau squarely on his own ground, as Giulini more or less did in an earlier deleted EMI recording but such encounters are not for the gramophone. They belong to one-off live performances where the hall and the occasion better meet the listener's needs. The 1970 Philips recording is reasonably clean, though some tape background remains in the digital remastering. Arrau and Brendel represent very different schools of piano playing, interpretation, and the like. To possess both recordings is to set yourself up with food for thought and debate that will last you long into the night."

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Claudio Arrau - 100th Anniversary Collection
A mostly worthy anniversary collection dedicated to a truly great pianist
Author: Richard Osborne / Excerpts from the article

"Of the three great pianists born in 1903 – Arrau, Serkin and Horowitz – Horowitz was almost certainly the most famous but it was Arrau who was surely the most ‘complete’, the Titan of the trio. Daniel Barenboim once described Arrau as his ideal: ‘Someone with an uncanny control of his instrument, with probably the widest repertoire of any pianist past or present, and with a tremendous interest in areas outside his specialisation.’ Arrau’s repertory was, indeed, huge; it was also ‘big’ in the works it included (nothing trivial, nothing for show) and astonishingly catholic, as this anniversary collection confirms.

In his early years, Arrau was a formidable virtuoso and so, in a sense, he remained."

"With Arrau, however, virtuosity was never an end in itself. When his unfailingly musical account of Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto was first reviewed in these columns, Max Harrison saw it as ‘a rather special case of the great pianist who has left virtuosity behind’. ‘Music rebukes us,’ Arrau once said, ‘for it is wider and richer than any of us knows.’ Like Serkin, he never filleted the music he played, never ‘de-boned’ it for easy consumption. Neville Cardus famously described Arrau as the only pianist in his experience to give us ‘Chopin the full man, artist and strong-fibred musician’; and although it didn’t necessarily please some Francophone collectors, there was a similar rigour and depth to his Debussy. (Harrison despaired of doing justice in words to Arrau’s recordings of the Préludes; Joan Chissell described them as ‘spellbinding’.)"

"Arrau’s 1969 account of Brahms’s D minor Concerto with Haitink and the Concertgebouw can be found in a two-CD Brahms concerto set or in the Arrau volume in Philips’s ‘Great Pianists’ series. I don’t begrudge this: a more anguished, yet at the same time noble andfar-seeing, performance of the Brahms it is difficult to imagine."

Brahms: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 - Henryk Szeryng, RCO, Bernard Haitink. Recording 1973
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