Various composers: The Incomparable Rudolf Serkin

As with Sony’s recent Serkin reissue (see Sandy’s review of The Great Beethoven Sonatas), Beethoven features prominently on DG’s twofer, entitled The Incomparable Rudolf Serkin. He enjoyed a fruitful Indian summer in association with the Yellow Label, recording Mozart piano concertos with Claudio Abbado and the LSO (there’s a spunky K451 included here) as well as a marvellous Brahms disc in partnership with Rostropovich (the new volume includes the E minor sonata). Best of all is a deeply moving live recital of the last three Beethoven sonatas. There are frailties (he was 84 at the time), yet the wisdom and searching intelligence of these interpretations make for an unforgettable experience. “Incomparable” indeed.

About the pairing

Rudolf Serkin’s late recordings for Deutsche Grammophon brought him together with two very different partners. Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century, had a long-standing chamber-music partnership with Serkin that extended across several composers; their reading of Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E minor, Op. 38 sits alongside the more familiar solo-piano side of Serkin’s discography. Claudio Abbado, then in his years directing the London Symphony Orchestra, brought a chamber-scaled sensibility to Mozart’s concertos well suited to a pianist whose own reputation was built as much on Beethoven and Brahms as on Mozart. Serkin himself, a longtime professor and later director at the Curtis Institute of Music and co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival with his father-in-law Adolf Busch, spent his career prizing exactly the kind of unhurried, collaborative music-making this two-disc set reflects. The live Beethoven recital that closes the set was recorded in his final years of public performance, giving this particular pairing an added weight beyond the studio sessions either partnership might otherwise have produced.