Revox Master Tape, FRIEDRICH GULDA - BEETHOVEN DIABELLI VARIATIONS

“The purest Beethoven of the decade” (Joachim Kaiser) – unadulterated and pure.

The Diabelli Variations are a cycle of extremes, rich in contrasts, dramatic – as if made for Friedrich Gulda, the punk among pianists, who always rejected convention, delved almost maniacally into the depths of the works, and brought something new to the listener’s ear.

In his work, Beethoven unites old and new currents of music history into a unique point of crystallization. He combines the strict horizontal thinking of the Baroque, as found in fugues, with the vertical compositional style of the Classical era, expressed in sonata form – and yet he questions every tenet and reaches far ahead into the freedom of Romanticism.
Gulda, a lover of fast cars, drives so fearlessly and consistently into the steep walls of this expansive work like no other pianist. When loud, then properly loud; when soft, then silky smooth – to the outermost point that the centrifugal force of the composition allows, toward the center that always drew him. In this race, Gulda, with his literally boundless musical knowledge, carves out a sovereign path of his own.
As a great admirer of Bach and Mozart, whose works he studied throughout his life as a composer and jazz musician, Gulda glides over the dynamic edges of Beethoven’s compositions to explore the core of the works.

As early as the 1960s, Joachim Kaiser wrote about Gulda:
“He plays the most eloquent, natural, captivating, and purest Beethoven of our decade.”
At the end of that decade came this recording, which has become the benchmark.

As a congenial artistic partner, the legendary MPS founder and sound purist Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer portrays Gulda’s radical piano dramaturgy with microphones suspended over the strings of the grand piano in almost tangible immediacy. Preserving the unique sound of this recording, which is so closely interwoven with the interpretation, is at the heart of this reissue.
At the MSM studio in Munich, specializing in the audiophile preparation of analog tapes, mastering engineer Christoph Stickel has removed the aging traces from the almost 46-year-old master tape entirely analog and with the utmost care, revealing the sound of the recording as Gulda and Brunner-Schwer intended.

Label: MPS

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