Beethoven/Scharwenka: Complete Symphonies, Vol. 3
To purchase it from the SOMM Recordings website, please click here.Reviews
The Sunday Times on Vol. 3 (Beethoven Symphonies nos. 2 and 7):
The two distinguished pianists continue with their enthralling and revelatory cycle of Beethoven Symphonies in the transcription for piano by Franz Xaver Scharwenka. As with the previous volumes, the third disc offers dual delights: you can easly feel you are listening to entirely new works and experience moments when your response will be along the lines of “Ah yes, that bit”. Both are richly rewarding.
Ates Orga in International Piano Magazine:
These skilled and imaginative arrangements are big-boned affairs, prompting one to muse that the domestic duettists of Mahler’s and Zweig’s pre-First World War Vienna or Busoni’s Berlin must have been a generation of precocious facility. Uys and Schoeman handle content and texture impeccably and with emphatic understanding … often besetting the best conductors. Such is the sweep of texture and dynamics, the ‘colouring’ of canvas, the fierce march of temperament, that for much of the time the presence of an orchestra isn’t missed.
Rebecca Franks in the BBC Music Magazine (Four Stars):
I was immediately struck by the orchestral quality of their sound, its depth, volume and colour. That’s a benefit of having four hands at one piano, rather than two, and surely testament to Scharwenka’s skill. It pays off particularly in Symphony No. 2 … And it’s true that their approach is less like a fleet-footed period instrument ensemble and more like a large Romantic orchestra in the ‘apotheosis of the dance’. But Symphony No. 7 works well either way, and this is an exhilarating account.
Peter J Rabinowitz in Gramophone Magazine:
Uys and Schoeman cut through the clutter with impressive unanimity … It all sounds idiomatic, both as Beethoven and as piano music … an imposing recording.