• Tracks

A famous Beethoven work and a Reicha premiere in the hands of exceptional

performers. Just like the well-known drama of Beethoven's life, the biography of Anton

Reicha would also make an exciting film, but this recording mainly shows us

the friendship of the two great composers at the turn of the 18th and 19th

centuries. They were born the same year, and from their first encounter as

15-year-olds in the Bonn court orchestra, they became close friends. They

studied together at the university in Bonn, and they both became friends

of Haydn. Their music also shared similarities mainly during Reicha's period

in Vienna. It was while Reicha was in Vienna that he wrote his only piano

concerto and that Beethoven wrote his fifth and most famous work in

the genre. Both concertos are in the "heroic" key of E flat major. While

Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto" is a mainstay of the piano literature, this

is the first complete recording of Reicha's concerto. Missing pages from

the solo part were first discovered in 2018. Jan Bartos is a highly acclaimed

interpreter of Beethoven, and here he is following in the tradition of his

teachers Ivan Moravec and Alfred Brendl. The wonderful playing of the Vienna

Symphony Orchestra, which has Beethoven's blood in it's veins, gives the live

recording from the Prague Spring Festival the hallmark of authenticity. Playing

the meticulously detailed accompaniment in the studio recording of Reicha's

concerto is the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. Bartos's partner at the

helm of both orchestras is Petr Popelka, today undisputedly a world-class

conductor who has the rare ability to breathe meaning and life into every

note. The friends Beethoven and Reicha are symbolically reunited after more

than two centuries on a single album in special musical company.