Claudio Arrau

THE UNRELEASED BEETHOVEN RECITAL 1959

The Lost Recordings has rediscovered the master tapes of this double recital in the Berlin radio archives. The label thus offers the world premiere of this Beethoven recital by the great Claudio Arrau, recorded on 12 March 1959 at the Hochschule für Muzik in Berlin. An exceptional document.

When he took the stage at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik in Berlin on 12 March 1959, Claudio Arrau, at the age of 56, was an artist at the height of his fame and in the fullness of his pianistic and intellectual qualities.

Rarely better than in these solitary piano pieces, inextricably intertwining sentimental confession, wandering mystical reverie and constant concern for form, has Beethoven put "on stage and in sound" the common man grappling with his confused feelings, doubts and existential wanderings, transcending with his creative genius the contingencies and limits of his aleatoric condition in order to aim at the sublime and monumental.