Beaux Arts Trio: Complete Philips Recordings

On time delivery of a hard to find item. Very good

Amazing music, played divinely. Just buy it!As I paid for this myself, unlike many of the recent reviews springing up all around Amazon, it is unbiased.

Very Good!!!

very good

wonderrful

Good

A monument in recorded music History, for sure. I thank the editors the idea of letting us to choose among the different recordings of several works and not to have chosen for us. I have already listened all the works in wich we can hear both Beaux Arts trios (basically): the one with Mr. Guilet and the one with Mr. Cohen. It is very, very interesting to discover the vast difference between both versions. If I would be forced to choose one, I would choose the recordings with Mr. Guilet. They are much more close to the idea I've got about chamber music playing, about the fun of making music together. Not only because of Guilet's playing, but also Greenhouse's: in the second, digital version of the works, the art of Greenhouse seems to have dissapeared to my opinion; yes, more polished sound, technically superior if you want, but the grace and charm of the Music has gone in a certain way. I would love to hear opinions about this matter, yet I believe it is one of the most important issues in this edition. Mr. Pressler is always a joy to listen to, in any case. He is probably my all time favourite in the art of piano trios wise. A great, great Maestro.

Apart from the star rating this is not a review of the recordings but rather of the box set as such. As to the recordings I am not going to review them since there are plenty reviews available of individual discs and I have only heard about a third of the discs (mostly those I already own; but of course that is sort of a recommendation, just not a review). The box is fairly solid with the lid hinged on at the back. The sleeves do not have original cover art and the recordings are not all presented like the original LP’s. I should much have preferred to have original covers and also not to have mixed certain recordings (it makes sense to fit Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn on as few discs as possible for instance, but not always elsewhere) – it would have meant a few cd’s more and probably a higher price, though. The back of the sleeves states the personnel and the year of recording for each piece which I think is a good thing. The first 15 discs are bluish, the next 35 are sort of red ad the last 20 are bronze (why?). The booklet contains a few pictures of original covers and also quite a few of the trio and its members. There is an essay by Tully Potter and an index of composers. It is not very clear but some recordings may have been remastered as credit for mastering is given for discs 11, 24, 26, 30, 36, 38 and 54 (you can look the discs and their contents up at the DG or Decca website). Sampling Schubert (disc 26) and Brahms (disc 38) to previous editions I couldn’t tell any differences, though. The Gassenhauer Trio (Beethoven op. 11) with George Pieterson on clarinet is the only work claimed to be new on cd. If you don’t care for duplication of the same works you could look at it this way: You will get just over 40 discs of piano trios (for a lot of people I imagine that the issue will be that they already own some of the recordings in the box). The lack of original covers is not enough to detract from the overall appeal of getting all of the trios Philips recordings in one box for a price of roughly £1.50 pr. disc.