Pablo Casals, Rudolf Serkin - Beethoven: The Complete Cello Sonatas 2LP

These recordings stand among the most celebrated chamber music performances ever committed to disc. Made at the Pablo Casals Festival in Prades and Perpignan in 1951, they capture two of the twentieth century’s supreme instrumentalists at the height of their powers. Pablo Casals had founded the Prades Festival in 1950, breaking a years-long self-imposed silence to protest the international community’s continued recognition of Franco’s regime in Spain; the festival, set in the French Pyrenees where Casals had settled in exile, drew the finest musicians in the world. Rudolf Serkin — already renowned as one of the era’s greatest pianists — was among those who came, and the partnership between cellist and pianist produced performances of extraordinary authority and depth. Gramophone noted that “Serkin matches Casals’s grandeur with his own equally characterful, expressively coloured performance.”

The Five Sonatas

Beethoven’s five cello sonatas span virtually his entire creative life and represent some of the most searching music in the chamber repertoire. The two early Op. 5 sonatas (F major and G minor, 1796) are ambitious, forward-looking works that elevated the cello from an accompanying role to true equality with the piano. The celebrated A major Sonata, Op. 69 (1808), from the composer’s middle period, is among the warmest and most lyrical works he wrote — a work of expansive melody and intimate dialogue. The two late sonatas, Op. 102 (1815), are among Beethoven’s most enigmatic and profound utterances: terse, harmonically bold, and shot through with the austere spiritual quality that characterises his final years. Together they form an incomparable cycle, and Casals and Serkin navigate all five with unflinching conviction and musical intelligence.

This Pressing

Music On Vinyl — the Dutch audiophile reissue label based in Rotterdam — has reissued this landmark recording on heavyweight 180g vinyl across two LPs (catalogue number MOVLP3054), presented in a gatefold sleeve. Music On Vinyl is celebrated for the care and craftsmanship applied to its reissue programme, drawing from original master tapes to produce pressings that bring classic recordings to a new generation of listeners with fidelity and warmth befitting the performances they preserve.