“Love of Beethoven’s works threads through Biret’s life like a red ribbon. Her studio recordings and live concerts show this in an unequivocal language…Next to the Piano Concertos, the Triple Concerto and the Choral Fantasy she has also recorded and performed on stage all the Piano Sonatas and Symphony Transcriptions becoming perhaps the only artist to reach this level of completeness…This knowledge of Beethoven one hears in every nuance in Idil Biret’s playing.”
— Piano News (Germany)
“Biret’s concertos are quite classical in approach. Her articulation is crisp and wonderfully clear, rhythm is firmly controlled, and extremes are avoided. As a result the playing is never pushed, either by excessive speed or wide dynamics. The moderate tempos allow lots of detail to come through, and we find once again the elegance and beauty of Beethoven…The Bilkent Symphony, in Antoni Wit’s hands, plays musically, with a fine sense of style.”
— American Record Guide
“Clarity, attention to details and deft sense for drama are in evidence in the performance of the concertos. If Alfred Brendel is lean and classical in his several Beethoven cycles, and Schnabel is driven and intense in his, Biret is monumental, dark and probing…Biret brings out much detail, and phrases the music intelligently throughout. The Bilkent Symphony from Turkey plays well…Antoni Wit (The Music Director of the Warsaw Philharmonic) conducts with a knowing hand, and the sound is vivid and powerful. Biret’s cycle of concertos may well go down with the finer recorded efforts, including those of Alfred Brendel.”
— Classical Net (USA)
“The performances are fresh and invigorating, gently sensual and spaciously paced. In some way, they are like the playing of Biret’s mentor, the great German pianist Wilhelm Kempff, in that they are clear and unpretentious, yet conveying an underlying structure of delicate poetry which can rouse itself on occasion to surprising eloquence and power. Her orchestral partner is the leading Turkish Orchestra, which plays with a sense of subtle textural dimensionality rarely heard in the West. Her conductor is Antoni Wit who contributes a superbly probing and elegantly phrased musical embrace.”
— Audiophile Audition (USA)
“Already in the 1980s Idil Biret played all the Liszt transcriptions of Beethoven’s Symphonies and established then her special affinity to Beethoven. Her recordings of the 5th Concerto and Choral Fantasy confirm this strongly once again.”
— Fonoforum (Germany)