BACKHAUS plays Beethoven Concerto 1, Diabelli Vars

To compliment our ongoing series of Wilhelm Backhaus's Beethoven piano sonatas, we're also remastering many of his other 1950s Beethoven recordings. This week sees his only recordings of both the Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, and the Diabelli Variations, both stereo studio recordings made by Decca in 1958 and 1954 respectively.

These newly XR-remastered transfers bring both much-needed pitch stability to the Concerto, and a glorious piano tone previously "boxed in" and rather dull in the Variations.

The Gramophone praised Backhaus's Diabelli as "a magnificent achievement", played with "an astonishingly youthful vigour", whilst his Concerto No. 1 was hailed as "a dashing, mettlesome performance, well poised...particularly good". Together they form a fine introduction to the second half of our Backhaus Beethoven Edition.

VAN KEMPEN plays Beethoven

Mark Obert-Thorn has been hard at work on these wartime recordings made in Dresden in 1940 and 1941 by Dutch conductor Paul van Kempen with the Dresden Philharmonic, a considerable proportion of which have never been reissued on a digital format before.

Moreover, when van Kempen returned to the studio in the aftermath of war and at the beginning of the LP era, these were works which he did not return to in the recording studio.

Paul van Kempen trained originally as a violinist, and played in the Concertgebouw Orchestra under the baton of Willem Mengelberg, a conductor who greatly influenced him, both musically and in his decision to become a conductor himself.

Van Kempen was one of those few conductors with the ability to take a "middling" orchestra and raise it to world class standards - as these Dresden recordings amply demonstrate.