Julius Katchen – The Brahms Recordings (17CD)

A complete collection of Julius Katchen’s Brahms recordings, featuring him as heroic concerto soloist, dynamic chamber-music partner and rugged, scintillating protagonist in the solo-piano music. LIMITED EDITION.

After Julius Katchen’s untimely death from cancer in April 1969, aged just 42, the tribute paid by his record label Decca could claim without hyperbole that Katchen was ‘one of the finest Brahms interpreters of his generation’. Less than 20 years earlier, he had burst like a firework onto the international scene with a record of Brahms’s F minor Sonata, which became the first solo-piano LP to be issued by Decca. Critics and listeners were quick to admire the muscular, aquiline profile of playing that felt true to Brahms as the ‘keyboard lion’ of his own generation.

In fact Katchen had made his debut on record a few months earlier, with the Handel Variations captured at Decca’s West Hampstead studios in April 1949. He would go on to re-record the Variations in both 1958 and 1962, and this new Eloquence box presents all three versions side by side for the first time, demonstrating how Katchen’s pianism matured during his brief career while losing none of its barnstorming virtuosity.

Katchen also recorded and then revisited the Paganini Variations, in 1959 and 1966, as well as the Third Sonata, as part of a stereo cycle of the complete solo piano works, made between 1961 and 1965. By then he had recorded both concertos, with the LSO conducted by Pierre Monteux and János Ferencsik. Towards the end of the 60s, Decca then captured him in timely manner as a sensitive partner to Josef Suk in the violin sonatas (which he had already recorded twice with Ruggiero Ricci in the 50s, both versions also being reissued here), the clarinet sonatas with Thea King, the cello sonatas with János Starker and piano trios with Suk and Starker.

As Mark Ainley outlines in his booklet essay, surveying Katchen’s meteoric career and special affinity with Brahms, the First Cello Sonata (a 1968 recording from Aldeburgh, made at the same time as the piano trios) was never issued; so too a 1967 set of the clarinet sonatas, in company with Michel Portal. With their first-ever release, this Decca Eloquence set presents the fullest possible portrait of Katchen as a sovereign interpreter of Brahms, capturing the music’s muscular energy, refined nuancing, and emotional breadth.