In the April 7 issue of the New York Review of Books, Robert Winter writes about Sony’s 21-CD “boxed set of twenty-one CDs corresponding to the twenty-one LPs that the pianist and writer Charles Rosen recorded for the Columbia and Epic labels between 1959 and 1972 … at a price [$60] unthinkable even a decade ago.… Declining CD sales have forced struggling labels to invent new strategies for moving inventory…. Charles Rosen … turns out to have been a poor (and uninterested) self-promoter…. Where is the official website carefully cultivated to shape our views? (Go to danielbarenboim.com or itzhakperlman.com or jeremydenk.com and you will find professional websites that also sell their CDs.) … It is virtually impossible today to lay your hands on most of the half-dozen recordings Rosen made before 1959 for small labels long since gone. Most of those he made between 1977 and 1997 are out of print. The Sony set bears solitary witness to Rosen in his prime…. One indisputable fact emerges immediately: Charles Rosen was among the most versatile and fearless pianists of the twentieth century.”
Posted March 31, 2016
