Friedrich Gulda -

Ludwig van Beethoven - Diabelli Variations

"The purest Beethoven of the decade" (Joachim Kaiser) pure and unadulterated.

The Diabelli Variations are a cycle of extremes, rich in contrast, dramatic, as if made for Friedrich Gulda, the punk among pianists, who always rejected conventions, digging almost manically into the depths of the works and bringing new things to the ears.

In his work, Beethoven unites old and new currents of music history into a unique crystallisation point. He combines the strictly horizontal way of thinking of the Baroque, as found in fugues, with the vertical way of composition of the Classical period, which found expression in the sonata form - and yet he questions every tenet of faith and reaches far ahead of the freedom of Romanticism.
Gulda, a lover of fast cars, drives so fearlessly consistently into the steep walls of this wide-ranging work as no other pianist. When loud, then really loud, when quiet, then silky smooth - to the furthest point allowed by the centrifugal force of the composition, to the centre of which he has always been drawn. In this race, Gulda, with his literally limitless musical knowledge, drives a sovereign line of his own.
As a great lover of Bach and Mozart, whose works he has grappled with all his life, as a composer and jazz musician, Gulda flies over the dynamic edges of Beethoven's compositions in order to plumb the core of the works.
Thus Joachim Kaiser wrote of Gulda as early as the 1960s: "He plays the most eloquent, natural, captivating and pure Beethoven of our decade." At the end of the decade in question is this recording, which has become a standard.
As a congenial artistic partner, the legendary MPS founder and sound purist Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer portrays Gulda's radical piano dramaturgy with the microphones hung directly over the strings of the piano in an almost vividly tangible way. Preserving the unique sound of this recording, which is so deeply interwoven with the interpretation, is at the core of the new edition.
At the MSM Studio in Munich, which specialises in the audiophile refurbishment of analogue tapes, mastering engineer Christoph Stickel has cleaned the almost 46-year-old master tape of traces of ageing in a purely analogue and extremely careful manner and has uncovered the sound of the recording as it was intended by Gulda and Brunner-Schwer.

Label: MPS