• Tracks

Michel Béroff produced an impressive series of recordings over a period of more than 25 years for EMI. A quarter of a century full of musical highlights, ambitious projects, exciting artistic collaborations. This box is just as packed with music as it is with the life story of an exceptional talent. For connoisseurs, it represents the reopening of a treasure trove richly filled with reference recordings; for less experienced listeners, it offers a fantastic opportunity for discovery tours. And although much of it is already more than four decades old, this discography has remained as young and "timeless" as Michel Béroff himself. The box is enriched by two never-before-released recordings: a master tape from 1978 uniquely documents the outstanding and astonishingly mature Beethoven playing of the young Michel Béroff; together with Bach's Overture in the French style (from 1969), it adds another color to the dazzling mosaic, another zoom on a still radiant career that was marked by great artistic successes not only in the concert hall but also in the recording studio. Born in 1950, the French pianist Michel Béroff gave his first recital in Paris in 1967 and won the same year the First Prize of the first edition of the Concours international Olivier-Messiaen, whose jury was chaired by Olivier Messiaen himself. He had a dazzling international career since that alongside the greatest conductors: Seiji Ozawa, Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Daniel Barenboim, André Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Charles Dutoit among others. Béroff's extensive discography includes the complete works for piano and orchestra by Liszt, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, as well as a big part of solo piano works by Debussy, Messiaen (of which he is a renowned interpreter), Bartók, Schumann or Mussorgsky. His duets with the violinist Augustin Dumay and with the pianist Jean-Philippe Collard were acclaimed with incredible recordings made together and available in this box. The Messiaen, Debussy, Prokofiev and Mussorgsky are true highlights of this edition. The boxset includes worth of 3CDs of premiere on CD, and as a bonus (CD 42) two previously unpublished recordings (Bach & Beethoven).