Tag: Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven Trios (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 03:26:33 minutes | 1,98 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

An offspring of the Baroque trio sonata, the piano trio—usually denoting a work for piano, violin, and cello—was still in its infancy when Beethoven penned his first essay in the genre around 1791. Although he declined to assign an opus number to the early Trio in E-flat major (which would be published posthumously in 1830), the composer reportedly considered it “one of his worthiest experiments in the art of composition.”

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven – Piano Sonatas Nos. 27-32 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:41:28 minutes | 2,65 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

The legendary Daniel Barenboim, among his countless other accomplishments, is one of the world’s foremost Beethoven experts, having played or conducted just about every note the composer ever wrote. This project – recorded completely during this year’s lockdown – is set to become one of the classical recording events of the year!

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven – Piano Sonatas Nos. 20-26 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:51:33 minutes | 1,83 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

The legendary Daniel Barenboim, among his countless other accomplishments, is one of the world’s foremost Beethoven experts, having played or conducted just about every note the composer ever wrote. This project – recorded completely during this year’s lockdown – is set to become one of the classical recording events of the year!

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven – Piano Sonatas Nos. 13-19 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:24:45 minutes | 2,35 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

The legendary Daniel Barenboim, among his countless other accomplishments, is one of the world’s foremost Beethoven experts, having played or conducted just about every note the composer ever wrote. This project – recorded completely during this year’s lockdown – is set to become one of the classical recording events of the year!

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven – Piano Sonatas Nos. 7-12 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:08:24 minutes | 2,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires on November 15, 1942, into a family of Ukrainian Jewish descent. Daniel’s mother was his first piano teacher; he later studied with his father, Enrique Barenboim, who was an eminent music professor. After playing for the noted violinist Adolph Busch, who was impressed by his talent, Daniel made his debut recital at the age of seven. In 1951, he played at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and observed Igor Markevitch’s conducting class. The family moved to Israel in 1952; two years later, Daniel went back to Salzburg for a conducting course with Markevitch, piano studies with Edwin Fischer, and chamber music performance with Enrico Mainardi. He studied conducting with Carlo Zecchi at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, also attending Nadia Boulanger’s music theory and composition class at Fontainebleau. His U.S. debut was at New York’s Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1957, in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Symphony of the Air. Debuts with leading orchestras included the London Symphony Orchestra (New York, 1968), Berlin Philharmonic (1969), and New York Philharmonic (1970). Since then he has guest conducted virtually all of the world’s leading orchestras. In 1967, Barenboim married the brilliant cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, with whom he made several exceptional recital recordings. Unfortunately, this partnership ended when Du Pré contracted multiple sclerosis, which forced her to end her playing career in 1972. She died in 1987. In 1989 he was named as Sir George Solti’s successor as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1992, Barenboim became music director of the Berlin State Opera, then named chief conductor for life by its orchestra in 2002. In 1999, with Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a summer youth orchestra designed to foster understanding and cooperation, and he established the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin. Devoted to the training of young Arab and Israeli musicians, the school opened in 2016. A recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra appeared in 2013. Barenboim has a rich recorded repertoire as a conductor, pianist, accompanist, and chamber music player. Interestingly, as a pianist, he tends to focus on Mozart, Beethoven, and the early Romantics, while as a conductor he favors later Romantic music, particularly Brahms and Bruckner (he has won a medal from the Bruckner Society of America). Barenboim’s recorded output continued to be abundant through his eighth decade, including not only standard repertory, but such novelties as On My New Piano (2016), an album devoted to the capabilities of an instrument custom-made for Barenboim by Belgian builder Chris Maene, and based on a piano owned by Liszt. As a conductor he continued to undertake lengthy, difficult scores by the likes of Bruckner and Mahler. His 2017 recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the Staatskapelle Berlin was critically acclaimed.
– Joseph Stevenson, James Manheim

Daniel Barenboim – Beethoven – Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-6 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:17:57 minutes | 2,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires on November 15, 1942, into a family of Ukrainian Jewish descent. Daniel’s mother was his first piano teacher; he later studied with his father, Enrique Barenboim, who was an eminent music professor. After playing for the noted violinist Adolph Busch, who was impressed by his talent, Daniel made his debut recital at the age of seven. In 1951, he played at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and observed Igor Markevitch’s conducting class.

Daniel Barenboim – Elgar – Sea Pictures. Falstaff (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:49 minutes | 0,99 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.

No conductor working today has done more to internationalise Elgar’s music than Daniel Barenboim. Like Georg Solti and Bernard Haitink before him, Barenboim has recognised that the best of Elgar’s music deserves to be compared with that of his European contemporaries, and that its roots are often more firmly embedded in Austro-German late Romanticism than they are in the pastoral landscapes of Edwardian England. He made an extensive series of Elgar recordings with the London Philharmonic in the 1970s, but returned to the composer in 2014 with a recording of the Second Symphony, followed two years later by the First. Magnificently played by the Berlin Staatskapelle, with its burnished, dark central European sound, both performances were a revelation, immediately reconnecting Elgar with the composers he most admired, Brahms and Richard Strauss. If Barenboim’s subsequent Berlin recording of The Dream of Gerontius was less exceptional, it still cast fresh light on a staple of the British choral repertoire.
Elgar: Sea Pictures; Falstaff album art work

The two works on this latest disc present a very different challenge, however. Where the symphonies and even Gerontius relate very obviously to European archetypes, there’s something much more indelibly English about both Falstaff and the song cycle Sea Pictures. Falstaff is the nearest that Elgar came to composing a Straussian tone poem (he called it a “symphonic study”), but there is something missing here. Technically once again the performance is impeccable, but it misses a nostalgic dimension that the finest British recordings – Adrian Boult’s, John Barbirolli’s – identify more convincingly without ever becoming twee, which Barenboim’s performance unexpectedly does.

The Latvian mezzo Elīna Garanča is the soloist in Sea Pictures. Janet Baker’s recording with Barbirolli is the benchmark here, and though Garanča’s diction can be indistinct and she doesn’t match Baker’s conviction in the fusty Victorian poetry that Elgar sets, her golden sound and warm, supple phrasing are still very appealing on their own terms.