Beethoven: Pno Con No. 3 Pno Sonatas [CD]

A new recording of Beethoven masterpieces by a Hungarian pianist acclaimed for her 'intelligence, technical finesse, and innate musicality' (Classics Today).As issued by Brilliant Classics in 2025, a 34CD box of music from Bach to Bartok demonstrated the impressive range of Klara Wurtz's musical affinities, in recordings which span over two decades. According to Rob Cowan in Gramophone, the box testified to a career of consistent excellence in the studio, 'her performances attentive to detail, sprightly and invariably at one with her chosen repertoire'. Such praise amplified the enthusiastic reception accorded to her long-pondered recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, made for Piano Classics, and which was given an Editor's Choice by Gramophone for it's 'selfless commitment and personality, bringing delicacy, drama and architectural splendour to this great music.'In her latest recording, Klara Wurtz turns to equally canonic repertoire by Beethoven: the Third Piano Concerto, the 'Pathetique' and 'Moonlight' Sonatas. This illuminating combination allows the listener to trace Beethoven's development in a concentrated span of three years on the cusp of the 19th century, and specifically through his special feeling for the tragic-heroic key of C minor, which reached it's most celebrated expression in the Fifth Symphony. The slow movement of the 'Pathetique' Sonata has achieved hardly less iconic status in the popular imagination. It's mood of inward contemplation transports the listener to a space inside the mind of the 28-year-old Beethoven, which the outer panels of the sonata further heighten with their high and noble drama. From three years later, the C sharp minor of the 'Moonlight' Sonata further intensifies those contrasts of serenity and struggle with it's sublime opening movement followed by a pair of intricate and fiendishly demanding movements. In 1800 - the year before the 'Moonlight' - Beethoven addressed the legacy of Mozart head-on in the Third Piano Concerto, which takes both it's key and the shape of it's opening motif from the earlier composer's Concerto K491. Klara Wurtz is given attentive and lively support by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice under their experienced Armenian music director, Vahan Mardirossian.