Beethoven Complete Piano Concertos

Beethoven Complete Piano Concertos concert. Jan Lisiecki plays with Tomo Keller leading the Academy of St Martin in the Fields as Concertmaster. We can’t tell exactly when these recordings were made and no videographer is credited on keepcase artwork. Released 2020, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

It’s a red-flag when no videographer gets credit on the keepcase artwork. Here are some clips from Deutsche Grammophon; be sure to set your playback at 1080 for HD resolution. These clips suggest that this material has a serious DVDitis problem, but it may still be better than earlier videos of the same music by Barenboim and Buchbinder:

Buy on Amazon

What's New

Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, fine-art documentaries, and paintings. In the journal below are independent (and hard-to-find critical) reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.

Feb 25. We have just completed one of our most ambitious reviews: Einstein on the Beach opera, the surreal 4 and 1/2 hour cult legend. Kudos, encomiums, and accolades to Opus Arte for giving us this authoritative and weirdly fascinating recording, which we grade A+. Absorbing and learning Einstein is uniquely challenging. We try to help out by providing aids not included in the keepcase materials: an accurate libretto and a list of segments in the opera with correct Opus Arte time stamps. Good luck!

We have some other good grades with an A for the recent Met The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) and a B- for an earlier The Pearl Fishers from Naples. Also, we recently gave an A- for the new Don Quixote from the Vienna State Ballet.