Search - Wanda Landowska :: Early Recordings

Rare and unissued Landowska recordings.

John Austin | Kangaroo Ground, Australia | 01/22/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Admirers of this great musician, and collectors of her recordings, will like to know what this Biddulph release offers. In a sentence, it offers everything she recorded prior to 1934, plus a fragment of a Mozart piano sonata recorded in 1938. First comes a series of 6 items (one previously unpublished) recorded in 1923. Although the pieces are ones she frequently played and subsequently re-recorded, there is nothing remarkable about these early versions. Anyone could be playing. In the 1926 batch, she is sometimes accompanied by a salon orchestra - apparently a requirement imposed on her. A batch of 4 from 1928 and another 4 from 1930 show her in good form, charging everything with as much rhythmic drive and expressiveness as she could coax from her Pleyel harpsichord. Landowska recorded five of Mozart's piano sonatas in Paris in 1938. Only one was issued before the German occupation of Paris . According to Denise Restout, a disciple of Landowska's and writer of the CD's program notes, the metal masters of the remaining unissued sonatas were destroyed "by the Nazis, who wanted to eradicate anything made by artists of Jewish origin". A "proof copy" of a second sonata survived. Now, on this CD, comes parts of another - an incomplete performance K 311. Transfers are by Mark Obert-Thorn, and the total timing is a fraction under 60 minutes."