Rudolf Serkin ranks among the greatest of 20th-century pianists; his repertoire ranged from Bach to Reger, but Beethoven was always at its very heart. In a career of well over half a century, he made numerous recordings of the piano concertos, but only two studio sets of all five – with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the early 1950s, and another in Boston 30 years later, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony. I heard Serkin live only a handful of times, all of them remarkable occasions, but those who were able to follow him more regularly always maintained that in the recording studio his playing seemed to lose some of the intensity that it conveyed so powerfully in concert.
In the autumn of 1977, in the Herkulessaal in Munich, he played all five Beethoven concertos as well as the Choral Fantasy in a series of concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík, another musician who, like Serkin, always put himself at the service of the music. Recordings of those performances were first released on disc in 2005, but in Britain at least they seem to have disappeared quickly from the catalogue; their reissue now makes available again what is in every respect a historic musical document.
