Alfred Cortot plays Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 ’live’ in 1947

If you wish to support The Piano Files, please consider membership at my Patreon page: ​ An April 13, 1947 concert performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 in C Major with Alfred Cortot as soloist, accompanied by Victor Desarzens and the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. Cortot had a long career with the gramophone - four decades of solo and concerto recordings (although some discs accompanying singer Félia Litvinne predate the first of these by more than 15 years). However, in his many hours of recordings, he did not produce any commercially issued recordings of solo or concerted works of Beethoven (there is some chamber music put down in the 1920s), despite these being a major part of his repertoire for decades. He did record the complete Beethoven Sonatas in the late 1950s when he was around 80 years old, in two formats - as entire performances and as lecture-demonstrations in which he played excerpts while speaking about the wo