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Stories   >   Andras Schiffs typically intelligent accounts of the two Brahms piano concertos makes The Guardian's 'best classical releases of 2021'

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Andras Schiffs typically intelligent accounts of the two Brahms piano concertos makes The Guardian's 'best classical releases of 2021'

Posted: December 16, 2021
The Guardian's Andrew Clements writes......In 2020, the schedules of the classical record industry hardly seemed to miss a beat, despite all the disruptions of Covid-19. Live performances mined from the archives and a backlog of studio-made recordings provided more than enough material to maintain a near-normal stream of releases. And even this year, when such reserves have surely been depleted, there has been no obvious slackening in the pace of new issues. The range and variety has however very clearly changed, with certain areas of the repertory significantly less well represented in comparison with previous years.
 
Those shortages have been most acutely in the areas of opera and orchestral music. Even before the pandemic, major studio recordings of opera were becoming increasingly rare, with most new issues stemming from live performances; now, with most of the world's opera houses closed for large parts of the last two years, even that source is starting to dry up, if only temporarily one hopes. Perhaps the most significant operatic release of the year came on DVD from the Bayerisches Staatsoper's new label, its 2019 production of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, with Jonas Kaufmann and Marlis Petersen leading the cast.
 
Orchestras, too, have had few opportunities to give live concerts or make studio recordings with a full complement of players. Krystian Zimerman's cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos, with Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, was squeezed in between lockdowns at the end of last year, as were Gabriel Schwabe's wonderfully straightforward performances of two of the greatest British cello concertos, Elgar's concerto and Bridge's Oration. But two of the most significant new orchestral releases, Osmo Vänskä's superb reading of Deryck Cooke's "performing version" of Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony, and András Schiff's typically intelligent accounts of the two Brahms piano concertos, played on an 1859 Blüthner piano with the period instruments of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, were recorded in 2019. 
 
András Schiff: Brahms Piano Concertos makes our 'best classical releases of 2021.' The Guardian said: "Schiff makes his interpretative points without exaggeration or over-assertiveness. The performances cast new light on two of the greatest piano concertos in the repertoire."
 
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