For more than 50 years, the international Beethoven Competition held by piano manufacturer Bösendorfer and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna has been...

For more than 50 years, the international Beethoven Competition held by piano manufacturer Bösendorfer and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna has been taking place every 4 years; in 2017 for the 15th rendition, the Italian Rodolfo Leone was crowned as 1st prize winner by the highly regarded international jury from far more than 250 competing young talents. His play induces critics to utterances like “... he seemed to be communicating with distant worlds, as a true sound philosopher” (Oberösterreichische Nachrichten), which Rodolfo Leone documents with this Beethoven album. Besides the Sonata Op. 106, the famous Hammerklavier-Sonata, by extent and musical content the most complex, outshining all the others of Beethoven’s sonatas, an interlude, the Andante favori is given, which Beethoven originally composed as slow movement of the Waldstein sonata, Op. 53, which follows afterwards. This album is a debut with great interpretive maturity and indescribable power.