Thursday, December 4, 2014

Charles Rosen's Epic & Columbia recordings

Sony has reissued pianist Charles Rosen's complete Epic and Columbia Masterworks recordings. Rosen, who was a pupil of Moritz Rosenthal, attended Princeton at the same time as my teacher. Click here to read my review.


2 comments:

Overbeeke said...

Is there a chance that Rosen's pre-epic recordings will be republished? They include pieces Rosen never reecorded again, such as solo works by Martinu and Brahms and chamber music by Mozart and Poulenc. And although he rerecorded the Debussy Etudes plus some pieces by Haydn and Mozart, his early vision is, I expect, interesting enough to hear. I am glad to say I was his pupil at Stony Brook in 1984 and his courses on Romantic Music and Music Criticism were a great source of inspiration, both for me and the other students.

Emanuel Overbeeke

Hank Drake said...

In truth, I don't know. One of the reasons Sony is issuing these boxed sets is to renew copyright on the original recordings. But if the recording label goes defunct, and the copyright expires, then it's up to the initiative of a collector to issue a copy - and there seem to be fewer of those. Rosen made an early recording of Debussy Etudes (sometimes erroneously referred to as the first ever of those pieces) for the REB label. He also made a recording of Beethoven Sonatas Op. 26, Op. 27 Nos. 1 & 2, and Bagatelles for Nonesuch in the 1980s. And doubtless there are other recordings for multiple lables. Nonesuch has done a generally poor job of issuing their back catalog on CD, and REB appears to no longer exist. So I tend to doubt it. But they may surface as downloads offered by collectors.