BACKHAUS plays Beethoven Piano Sonatas 1-4

This week sees the start of a major new series at Pristine as we exhume, dust off and - finally - restore to the catalogue Wilhelm Backhaus's ground-breaking, and only complete, cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas.

These early 1950s recordings, almost certainly the first complete LP set, were hailed in their day and remain something of a bone of contention today for collectors and music-lovers - a later, incomplete stereo re-recording led to the mono originals being dropped from the catalogue, and they've rarely been seen since outside of a pricey and hard-to-obtain Japanese issue.

Now available in 32-bit XR remasters that blow some of the cobwebs off these wonderful recordings, we invite you to listen once more to some of the finest recordings ever made by one of the great Beethoven interpreters of the recording age.

POULENC Gloria, Organ Concerto, plays Satie duets

This release brings together two stereo recordings from 1961 - the first recording of his Gloria, recorded in the composer's presence a day after the work's European première in Paris, and the Organ Concerto, recorded a few days later but in need of some severe remedial action.

This release has, for the first time, managed to pull the organ and orchestra back in tune with each other. You can read the technical data on our web page, but basically the orchestra had tune considerably sharper than the organ was playing, to a painful end! A real shame, as the sound and performance was otherwise exemplary.

Finally we've unearthed two rare 78rpm discs of piano duets by Satie, as recorded in exuberant style by Poulenc himself, with Georges Auric, in 1937, for what we believe is their first commercial reissue.