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Alfred Brendel - Beethoven: Diabelli-Variationen (1990)

Alfred Brendel - Beethoven: Diabelli-Variationen (1990)

BAND/ARTIST: Alfred Brendel

  • Title: Beethoven: Diabelli-Variationen
  • Year Of Release: 1990
  • Label: Philips
  • Genre: Classical
  • Quality: FLAC (image+.cue,log)
  • Total Time: 52:38
  • Total Size: 177 Mb
  • WebSite:
Tracklist:

33 Variationen C-dur uber einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli, Op.120:
01. Tema : Vivace & Variation 1 : Alla marcia maestoso
02. Variation 2 : Poco allegro
03. Variation 3 : L'istesso tempo
04. Variation 4 : Un poco piu vivace
05. Variation 5 : Allegro vivace
06. Variation 6 : Allegro ma non troppo e serioso
07. Variation 7 : Un poco piu allegro
08. Variation 8 : Poco vivace
09. Variation 9 : Allegro pesante e risoluto
10. Variation 10 : Presto
11. Variation 11 : Allegretto
12. Variation 12 : Un poco piu moto
13. Variation 13 : Vivace
14. Variation 14 : Grave e maestoso
15. Variation 15 : Presto scherzando
16. Variation 16 : Allegro
17. Variation 17 : Allegro
18. Variation 18 : Poco moderato
19. Variation 19 : Presto
20. Variation 20 : Andante
21. Variation 21 : Allegro con brio - Meno allegro
22. Variation 22 : Allegro molto (alla 'Notte e giorno faticar' di Mozart)
23. Variation 23 : Allegro assai
24. Variation 24 : Fughetta (Andante)
25. Variation 25 : Allegro
26. Variation 26 : (Piacevole)
27. Variation 27 : Vivace
28. Variation 28 : Allegro
29. Variation 29 : Adagio ma non troppo
30. Variaiton 30 : Andante, sempre cantabile
31. Variation 31 : Largo, molto espressivo
32. Variation 32 : Fuga (Allegro)
33. Variation 33 : Tempo di minuetto moderato

Performers:
Alfred Brendel, piano

Brendel has now recorded the work three times for the gramophone. At first, on Vox/Turnabout in the early 1960s, he was the brilliant iconoclast before his deeper realization of the work's essentially comic energies. And here I use 'comic' both in the narrow sense of the term (the Diabe/li is, after all, full ofjokes, many of them with the staying-power of the finest Wildean epigrams) and in the broader sense: what Susanne Langer has called, comedy "as an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence". In this respect, Brendel's live 1977 recording of the work, made by Philips in collaboration with the BBC and reissued on CD in 1987 (though since deleted), is still something of a landmark. The piano itself may sound a trifle battle-weary by the end, but the performance is a tour de force, a finely thought out reading seemingly improvised into life with astonishing fire and intellectual acumen; there are even times when the timing of the pauses between variations is a source of both wonderment and tension, something you never get in an edited-down studio recording. By contrast, the new recording made in the studio in 1988 is a calmer affair and here I am not talking about tempos but about the general mood. We are off the hustings and back in the study. I couldn't resist playing the two recordings side by side at various points, though since each performance has an organic life of its own, this is a largely worthless procedure. That said, I prefer the paciness of the live reading of the astonishing Var. 10, music of "dippy ecstasy" (Wilfred Mellers's phrase) after the Allegro pesante e risoluto of Var. 9. The newest recording is more measured as befits a reading that works its way slightly more circumspectly to the newly poised expressiveness of the final variations, the concluding Minuet now an even more sophisticated essay in sublime gracefulness.




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