 In the course of them, Beethoven directs old and new streams of music history into a single unique point of crystallization - combining the strict horizontal Baroque mode of composition such as is encountered in fugues with the vertical thinking of the Classical era, which found its paradigm in sonata form – and at the same time he challenges every article of faith and boldly anticipates the freedom of the Romantic age. A cycle of extremes, stark contrasts and drama, as if written especially for Friedrich Gulda: the punk pianist who always defied convention, positively manic in the way he plunged his hands into the depths of a work and delivered new auditory experiences. Gulda, a lover of fast cars, drove straight into the cliff faces of interpretation with a consistency and fearlessness denied other pianists. If loud, then really loud; if soft, then soft as silk – to the outermost point that the momentum of the composition allows, after it has already drawn him to its centre. Gulda flies beyond the dynamic margins, one might say, so as to plumb the core of the work. In Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, MPS founder and sound purist, Gulda had in the late 1960s found a producer who was on his wavelength. Brunner- Schwer hung his microphones directly over the piano strings in order to give Gulda’s radical piano poesy a presence that was practically tangible. Capturing the unique sound of this recording, so deeply interwoven with the work’s interpretation, is at the heart of this new edition. Friedrich Gulda, the interpreter of the Diabelli Variations on this recording, was born in Vienna in 1930, studied with Seidlhofer and was an international celebrity at the age of twenty. His repertoire includes piano works from every . age and his concert tours have taken him all over the world. Gulda is a universal pianist who masters the most difficult pieces in piano Iiterature and is never known to give a mediochre performance, whether of Bach, Debussy, Beethoven or of his own jazz pieces. In his outstanding book “Great Pianists of our Time”, Joachim Kaiser deals very critically with the phenomenon of Friedrich Gulda. Despite a number of doubts which the prominent music and theatre critic expresses, particularly in connection with Gulda’s support for jazz: and his views on the interpreting artist, he praises his great musical and technical gifts: “Gulda’s remarkable qualities take him far beyond mere virtuosity and the capacity for “brillante” piano playing. And elsewhere: “Gulda plays the most articulate, fascinating, natural and purest Beethoven of the century.
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