For the 100th anniversary of Emil Gilels, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, Melodiya presents an anthology of his pianistic legacy.

“Titans of the piano like Gilels are born once in a hundred years,” wrote a Japanese correspondent in 1957; similar comments accompanied the musician’s performances throughout his performing career.

The performance of the young man from the Odessa Conservatory at the 1933 First All-Union Competition in
Moscow came as a bombshell: the audience gave him a standing ovation, and unfamiliar people congratulated each other on the emergence of a genius. Five years later, Gilels gained another unconditional victory at the international competition in Brussels. After WWII, in the period of the most strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West, Gilels conquered the public in the United States and Western Europe. The pianist never interrupted his concert life for half a century. Gilels’s art continued to develop through extending the repertoire and enhancing the interpretations of the works he had played many times, and at times the pieces already well known and “worn out” by other pianists received surprise readings from him.

The Melodiya anniversary release covers Gilels’s almost entire life in music from his first studio recording of 1935 (Liszt’s Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the number with which young Gilels caused a furor at the competition) to the artist’s last performance in Moscow in 1984 with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, one of the most difficult works in piano literature. Most part of the set is dedicated to live broadcasts that captured the pianist’s extensive repertoire – from Scarlatti and Bach to Shostakovich and Stravinsky, including a number of never-before-released interpretations such as Scriabin’s Sonata No. 1, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, Handel’s Chaconne, Borodin’s Scherzo etc.

The art of Gilels as an ensemblist is represented with his collaborations with the greatest Soviet performers such as Leonid Kogan, Mstislav Rostropovich and Rudolf Barshai. The recordings with the pianist’s sister, remarkable violinist Elizaveta Gilels, are worth a special mention. There are genuine rarities among the chamber ensemble recordings – Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet, Alexander Alyabyev’s Trio and César Cui’s Sonata for violin and piano.

Emil Gilels was a chairman of the panel of the Tchaikovsky International Competition for over twenty years and one of the few pianists who had all three piano concertos of the great Russian composer in his repertoire – all of them are featured in this set (two little-known recordings of the First Concerto made in 1948 and 1956 are particularly notable).

Emil Gilels played with the world’s best orchestras, and this release features the prominent Soviet conductors Konstantin Ivanov, Kirill Kondrashin, Rudolf Barshai and Evgeny Svetlanov accompanying the pianist.

Composers: Isaac Albéniz, Alexander Alyabiev, Arno Babajanian, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mily Balakirev, Ludwig van Beethoven, Alexander Borodin, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Muzio Clementi, César Cui, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Gabriel Fauré, César Franck, Alexander Glazunov, George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn, Adolph von Henselt, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturian, Franz Liszt, Jean Baptiste Loeilly, Nikolai Medtner, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saëns, Domenico Scarlatti, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Аlexander Scriabin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Antonio Vivaldi, Carl Maria von Weber, Moisey Weinberg

Perfomers: Emil Gilels, piano; Elizaveta Gilels, violin; Leonid Kogan, violin; Dmitri Tsyganov, violin; Rudolf Barshai, viola; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Daniil Shafran, cello; Sergei Shirinsky, cello; Yakov Zak, piano

Conductors: Rudolf Barshai, Karl Eliasberg, Konstantin Ivanov, Neeme Järvi, Kirill Kondrashin, Kurt Sanderling, Evgeny Svetlanov

50-CD SUPER DELUXE LIMITED EDITION BOX SET

Includes previously unreleased recordings, a poster and a hardback book in Russian, English, German and French.

Digitally remastered in 2016.

The graphic design includes materials from Emil Gilels’s family archive.