Schubert / Demus - Piano Music for Four Hands [2 CD]

On this release, recorded in 1978 and 2007, Paul Badura-Skoda and Jorg Demus present works by Schubert for piano four hands. The artists comment: "There are no such things as the two of us - two studious, open-minded young Viennese musicians who want to serve their darling Schubert with all their Four Hands in what is probably the most beautiful chamber music hall in the world, which Brahms loved so much that it later was named Brahms Hall, in the venerable house of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde - among the founding members were Beethoven and Schubert - on the most Viennese of all pianos, the Bösendorfer with it's singing, downright Schubertian treble. Both of us had just escaped physically and spiritually sound from the turmoil of war; one thought of creating a new world of the beautiful and the good, both of us at least in music. We had a unique generation of great masters to look up to: Wilhelm Backhaus, probably the greatest of all Bösendorf players, Walter Gieseking, Edwin Fischer - we were even granted to study together in Lucerne in 1948; Paul remained connected to him throughout his life. Above all, the wonderful violin sound of the Vienna Philharmonic delighted us, and in Furtwängler the brilliant overall conception: Have you heard "His" Unfinished, or the Great C major symphony? Schubert's songs delighted us with the wonderful voices of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, and soon also by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Joseph Krips had just presented the opera with a Mozart style that was fully natural. The whole world seemed to breathe a sigh of relief (it was before the darn Iron Curtain) and Vienna was once again the capital of music. And so we played the piano with our Four Hands, above all Mozart and Schubert, as faithfully as possible to the scores of Schubert, but we were happy to incorporate temperament, feeling and inspiration into our ten fingers."