C.k. Strong C.k. Strong

This 20-disc box set has been entertaining me for several months. Dutch pianist Ivo Janssen set up his own record label to distribute his 1997 Goldberg Variations, recorded on the hoof over two days in Haarlem. Its success prompted him to tackle Bach’s complete keyboard output. And there’s a sense of fly-by-night impetuosity about some of these performances, all taped in the same venue with the same producer, the cycle finally finished in 2009.

Franz Schubert - The Collector's Edition (50 CD Box Set). Repost

Franz Peter Schubert (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828) was an Austrian composer.
Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in Schubert's work increased dramatically in the decades following his death at the age of 31. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th Century. Today, Schubert is admired as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.

This reissue box collects the entire cycle of Mozart keyboard sonatas, plus single-movement works, recorded by Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda on a 1790 Schantz fortepiano that he himself owns. The six CDs included were originally recorded between 1978 and 1990 for a group of related French labels; the budget-price reissue on Naïve is a bit atypical for that label, which has specialized in innovative and lavishly designed full-priced releases. Online retail presentations may not make clear that they are fortepiano recordings, recordings made on a keyboard instrument probably very much like one Mozart would have played himself.