BEETHOVEN:PIANO SONATAS*GILELS*DG 9CD*LEGENDARY SEALED

	£		26
	$		34

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Andrew Clements
Friday December 22, 2006
The Guardian

Emil Gilels died suddenly in 1985. Together with Sviatoslav Richter he was one of the unquestionably great Russian pianists of the postwar Soviet era, and part of an outstanding generation of players from around the world, even though, compared with Richter, Gilels's art was not fully represented on disc. He would have been 90 this year, and Deutsche Grammophon has marked the anniversary with three major reissues. The most important of them are his hugely distinguished accounts of the Beethoven piano sonatas.   ... but when that 1952 account of the Beethoven is compared with the one made as part of his Beethoven cycle more than 20 years later, it shows how the steeliness became tempered with a more spacious humanity. The technique remained as imperious as ever - in the Hammer- klavier for instance, there's no trace of strain - but it had become a means to a much higher, infinitely more thoughtful musical end. If Gilels's Mozart now seems a little stiff and expressively unyielding - Böhm's heavy-legged accompaniments don't help either - then his Beethoven still remains peerless; it's one of the greatest sonata cycles ever recorded, should be a part of everyone's Beethoven collection.

 

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