Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19

Pletnev is one of the truly unique and universal artists on DG: Like Beethoven himself, Pletnev is a pianist, a conductor, and a composer. The Beethoven project is very close to his heart: “For me Beethoven is like a god. I worship him, and I admire his music. It always produces very deep emotions in me when I’m conducting it or playing it on the piano.”

“These performances of two of the most familiar of all piano concertos are fascinating and baffling by turns. You may not agree with everything Mihhail Pletnev does, but there's no mistaking his mastery and audacity.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2007 *****

“… in an overcrowded Beethoven concerto market these distinctive and excellently engineered performances are well worth hearing…….Beethoven’s Second and Fifth concertos make for an uncommon yet attractively contrasted CD coupling. More importantly, pianist John O’Conor and conductor Andreas Delfs invest their much-recorded scores with deep feeling, relaxed yet never draggy tempi, and freshly considered details that provide a welcome corrective to the attention-getting elbow-pokes and finger-jabs favoured by certain recent contenders in the name of “interpretation”.” Gramophone Magazine