Olli Mustonen - The RCA Recordings (Sony Classical Masters)
Sheet Music

SKU: NX.88985465572

By Olli Mustonen. By Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Classical. CD. Sony Music Entertainment #88985465572. Published by Sony Music Entertainment (NX.88985465572).

UPC: 889854655723.

The ever-more comprehensive Sony Classical Masters series is pleased to announce ten new releases. Ranging from symphony cycles to solo piano music, these budget-priced box sets celebrate some of the leading musicians of recent times. Finnish pianist-composer Olli Mustonen's recordings of Preludes and Fugues by Bach and Shostakovich were released in 1999 and 2004. "Perhaps only an artist as innovative and convincing as Mustonen could have made it work as well as it does," wrote BBC Music Magazine of the first volume. Of the second, Gramophone wrote that "one cannot deny either the brilliance or imagination of his playing". Mustonen boldly alternates between the composers' works: Andrew McGregor wrote for the BBC that "it becomes harder to hear where Bach ends and Shostakovich begins, and less important to separate them ... I recommend it without hesitation or reservation." Mustonen's 1998 recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations "contains moments of absolutely spellbinding playing, with textures of wonderful clarity and a deeply imaginative approach to the music," said BBC Music Magazine of an interpretation still considered iconoclastic today. It is reissued here along with a second disc of Beethoven featuring works including the E major sonata op. 109.