Marcelle Meyer plays Beethoven Emperor Concerto (1956 broadcast)

An October 29, 1956 broadcast of the fabled French pianist Marcelle Meyer playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.5 "Emperor" with the Orchestre de la Radio Suisse Romande conducted by Volkmar Andreae.

Meyer was a remarkable pianist with a huge repertoire and is today best remembered for her traversals of Baroque repertoire (particularly Rameau, Couperin, and Scarlatti) and early 20th century works (Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky - all composers she'd worked with). While her repertoire was much broader than her significant discography, there are several gaps in her studio accounts: not a note of Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann, for example, though she played them all in concert.

Similarly, there are no studio recordings of Meyer in Beethoven, though she did program his works (George Enescu wrote her a postcard praising her ‘unforgettable’ performance of Beethoven’s C Minor Concerto in the early 1930s), which makes this broadcast performance - made two years before her rather early death at the age of 61 in 1958 - particularly interesting. With her trademark crystalline tone, transparent textures, and refined nuancing, Meyer delivers a reading that is poetic yet certainly not lacking in strength, though power is not exhibited through overt external force but the effective use of contrasts.

If you wish to support The Piano Files, please consider membership at my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/thepianofiles

Видео Marcelle Meyer plays Beethoven Emperor Concerto (1956 broadcast) канала The Piano Files