This is a major project, the fruit of an unusual collaboration between the editor Michel Bernstein and the Viennese performer, pianist Paul Badura-Skoda, who passed away in 2019. Completed in the 1980s, this complete collection of Beethoven’s sonatas played on period instruments was no longer available. It is therefore an even greater blessing to have it again in a publication which now represents a double homage: to Beethoven for the 250th anniversary of his birth, and to the memory of Badura-Skoda.
Paul Badura-Skoda was an avid collector of period instruments, much like his longtime friend Jörg Demus. For this series of recordings, he chose seven pianofortes of the era, each one depending on the piece and the evolution of the making of the instrument. Badura-Skoda only ever played on period instruments and not on copies, risking all the mechanical faults that this entails.
Playing on old instruments became something of an obsession for the pianist who started his career at the end of the war playing on modern instruments (that he loved just as much) under the direction of the great conductors of his youth like Wilhelm Furtwängler or Herbert von Karajan. To this day, he remains the only pianist to have recorded all the sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on both period and modern instruments.
His comprehensive knowledge of the instruments allowed him to understand the intentions of the composers and correct any editor’s mistake accumulated over the centuries. Furthermore, his historic knowledge married with his reliable Viennese style makes his discographic legacy even more precious. © François Hudry/Qobuz